FORMS OF GOVERNANCE

[kmaherali]

In 1978, the Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave a commencement address at Harvard, warning us about the loss of American self-confidence and will. “A decline in courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today,” he declared.

Today, those words ring with disturbing force. The enemies of liberal democracy seem to be full of passionate intensity — Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Donald Trump, campus radicals. Meanwhile, those who try to defend liberal norms can sometimes seem like some of those Republicans who ran against Trump in the 2016 primaries — decent and good, but kind of feckless and about to be run over.

Into this climate emerges Fareed Zakaria’s important new book, “Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash From 1600 to the Present.” One of the powerful features of this book is that Zakaria doesn’t treat liberal democratic capitalism as some set of abstract ideas. He shows how it was created by real people in real communities who wanted richer, fuller and more dynamic lives.

His story starts in the Dutch Republic in the 16th century. The Dutch invented the modern profit-seeking corporation. The Dutch merchant fleet was capable of carrying more tonnage than the fleets of France, England, Scotland, the Holy Roman Empire, Spain and Portugal combined. By the 18th century, Amsterdam’s per capita income was four times that of Paris.

Dutch success wasn’t just economic. There was a cultural flowering (Rembrandt, Vermeer). There was urbanization — the building of great towns and cities. There was a civic and political stability built around decentralized power. There was a relatively egalitarian culture — until the 19th century, there were no statues of heroes on horseback in Holland. There was also moral restraint. Dutch Calvinism was on high alert for the corruption that prosperity might bring. It encouraged self-discipline and norms that put limits on the display of wealth.

The next liberal leap forward occurred in Britain. In the Glorious Revolution of the late 1680s, a Dutchman, William of Orange, became King of England and helped import some of the more liberal Dutch political institutions, ushering in a period of greater political and religious moderation. Once again, you see the same pattern: Technical and economic dynamism goes hand in hand with cultural creativity, political reform, urbanization, a moral revival and, it must be admitted, vast imperialist expansion.

British inventors and tinkerers like James Watt perfected the steam engine. From 1770 to 1870 real British wages rose by 50 percent, and over the first half of the 19th century British life expectancy increased by about 3.5 years.

The great reform acts in the 1800s gave more people the right to vote and reduced political corruption. The rise of, for example, the evangelical Clapham Sect in the early 19th century was part of a vast array of social movements led by people who sought to abolish the slave trade, reduce child labor, reform the prison system, reduce cruelty to animals, ease the lives of the poor and introduce codes of propriety into Victorian life. America was next, and the pattern replicated itself: new inventions like the telephone and the electric lightbulb. People flooding into the cities. During the 20th century, American culture dominated the globe. Thanks in part to the postwar American liberal order, living standards surged. As Zakaria notes, “Compared to 1980, global G.D.P. had nearly doubled by 2000, and more than tripled by 2015.”

And yet for all its benefits, liberalism is ailing and in retreat in places like Turkey, India, Brazil and, if Trump wins in 2024, America itself. Zakaria’s book helped me develop a more powerful appreciation for the glories of liberalism, and also a better understanding of what’s gone wrong.

I’m one of those people who subscribes to the Austrian psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s doctrine: “Man’s search for meaning is the primary motivation in his life.” To feel at home in the world, people need to see themselves serving some good — doing important work, loving others well, living within coherent moral communities, striving on behalf of some set of ideals.

The great liberal societies that Zakaria describes expanded and celebrated individual choice and individual freedom. But when liberalism thrived, that personal freedom lay upon a foundation of commitments and moral obligations that precede choice: our obligations to our families, to our communities and nations, to our ancestors and descendants, to God or some set of transcendent truths.

Over the past few generations, the celebration of individual freedom has overspilled its banks and begun to erode the underlying set of civic obligations. Especially after World War II and then into the 1960s, we saw the privatization of morality — the rise of what came to be known as the ethos of moral freedom. Americans were less likely to assume that people learn values by living in coherent moral communities. They were more likely to adopt the belief that each person has to come up with his or her own personal sense of right and wrong. As far back as 1955, the columnist Walter Lippmann saw that this was going to lead to trouble: “If what is good, what is right, what is true, is only what the individual ‘chooses’ to ‘invent,’ then we are outside the traditions of civility,” he wrote.

Trust is the faith that other people will do what they ought to do. When there are no shared moral values and norms, then social trust plummets. People feel alienated and under siege, and, as Hannah Arendt observed, lonely societies turn to authoritarianism. People eagerly follow the great leader and protector, the one who will lead the us/them struggle that seems to give life meaning.

During our current moment of global populism, the liberal tradition is under threat. Many people have gone economically nationalist and culturally traditionalist. Around the world, authoritarian moralists promise to restore the old ways, the old religion, national greatness. “There are certain things which are more important than ‘me,’ than my ego — family, nation, God,” Viktor Orban declared. Such men promise to restore the anchors of cultural, moral and civic stability, but they use brutal and bigoted strongman methods to get there.

President Biden tried to win over the disaffected by showering them with jobs and economic benefits. It doesn’t seem to have worked politically because the real absence people are feeling is an absence of meaning, belonging and recognition.

This election year, in the United States and around the globe, will be about whether liberalism can thrive again. Zakaria’s book will help readers feel honored and grateful that we get to be part of this glorious and ongoing liberal journey. He understands that we liberals can’t just offer economic benefits; we also have to make the spiritual and civic case for our way of life. He writes: “The greatest challenge remains to infuse that journey with moral meaning, to imbue it with the sense of pride and purpose that religion once did — to fill that hole in the heart.”

There’s glory in striving to add another chapter to the great liberal story — building a society that is technologically innovative, commercially daring, with expanding opportunities for all; building a society in which culture is celebrated, families thrive, a society in which the great diversity of individuals can experience a sense of common purpose and have the space and energy to pursue their own adventures in living.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/28/opin ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

From the Horror to the Envy of Africa: Rwanda’s Leader Holds Tight Grip

Thirty years after a devastating genocide, Rwanda has made impressive gains. But ethnic divisions persist under an iron-fisted president who has ruled for just as long.


President Paul Kagame of Rwanda in 2021. The architect of the country’s stunning transformation, he achieved it with harsh methods that would normally attract international condemnation.Credit...Simon Wohlfahrt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Blood coursed through the streets of Rwanda’s capital, Kigali, in April 1994 as machete-wielding militiamen began a campaign of genocide that killed as many as 800,000 people, one of the great horrors of the late 20th century.

Thirty years later, Kigali is the envy of Africa. Smooth streets curl past gleaming towers that hold banks, luxury hotels and tech startups. There is a Volkswagen car plant and an mRNA vaccine facility. A 10,000-seat arena hosts Africa’s biggest basketball league and concerts by stars like Kendrick Lamar, the American rapper, who performed there in December.

Tourists fly in to visit Rwanda’s famed gorillas. Government officials from other African countries arrive for lessons in good governance. The electricity is reliable. Traffic cops do not solicit bribes. Violence is rare.

The architect of this stunning transformation, President Paul Kagame, achieved it with harsh methods that would normally attract international condemnation. Opponents are jailed, free speech is curtailed and critics often die in murky circumstances, even those living in the West. Mr. Kagame’s soldiers have been accused of massacre and plunder in the neighboring Democratic Republic of Congo.

ImageA view of the city center of Kigali.

Three decades after the Rwandan genocide, Kigali is a modern capital and a destination for tourists, conventioneers and African officials.Credit...Ludovic Marin/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

For decades, Western leaders have looked past Mr. Kagame’s abuses. Some have expressed guilt for their failure to halt the genocide, when Hutu extremists massacred people mostly from Mr. Kagame’s Tutsi ethnic group. Rwanda’s tragic history makes it an “immensely special case,” Tony Blair, the former British prime minister, once said.

Mr. Kagame will commemorate the 30th anniversary of the genocide on Sunday, when he is expected to lay wreaths at mass graves, light a flame of remembrance and deliver a solemn speech that may well reinforce his message of exceptionalism. “Never again,” he often says.

But the anniversary is also a sharp reminder that Mr. Kagame, 66, has been in power for just as long. He won the last presidential election with 99 percent of votes. The outcome of the next one, scheduled for July, is in little doubt. Under Rwanda’s Constitution, he could lead for another decade.

The milepost has given new ammunition to critics who say that Mr. Kagame’s repressive tactics, previously seen as necessary — even by critics — to stabilize Rwanda after the genocide, increasingly appear to be a way for him to entrench his iron rule.

Questions are also growing about where he is leading his country. Although he claims to have effectively banished ethnicity from Rwanda, critics — including diplomats, former government officials and many other Rwandans — say he presides over a system that is shaped by unspoken ethnic cleavages that make the prospect of genuine reconciliation seem as distant as ever.

A spokeswoman for Rwanda’s government did not respond to questions for this article. The authorities declined accreditation to me to enter the country. A second Times reporter has been allowed in.

Image
A group of men, mostly in yellow shirts, using shovels in the dirt. Trees and rooftops are visible in the background.

Villagers and volunteers in Ngoma, Rwanda, digging for remains of victims of the Rwandan genocide after dozens of bodies were discovered there in January.Credit...Guillem Sartorio/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Ethnic Tutsis dominate the top echelons of Mr. Kagame’s government, while the Hutus who make up 85 percent of the population remain excluded from true power, critics say. It is a sign that ethnic division, despite surface appearances, is still very much a factor in the way Rwanda is governed.

“The Kagame regime is creating the very conditions that cause political violence in our country,” Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza, his most prominent political opponent, said by phone from Kigali. “Lack of democracy, absence of rule of law, social and political exclusion — it’s the same problems we had before.”

Ms. Ingabire, a Hutu, returned to Rwanda from exile in 2010 to run against Mr. Kagame for president. She was arrested, barred from taking part in the election and later imprisoned on charges of conspiracy and terrorism. Released in 2018, when Mr. Kagame pardoned her, Ms. Ingabire cannot travel abroad and is barred from standing in the election in July.

“I agree with those who say Rwanda needed a strongman ruler after the genocide, to bring order in our country, ” she said. “But today, after 30 years, we need strong institutions more than we need strong men.”

Image
A woman wearing a green jacket standing near the wall of her home. A garden is visible in the background.

Victoire Ingabire Umuhoza at home in Kigali on Monday. A political opponent of Mr. Kagame, she said his government was “creating the very conditions that cause political violence in our country.”Credit...The New York Times

Mr. Kagame burst into power in July 1994, sweeping into Kigali at the head of a Tutsi-dominated rebel group, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, which ousted the Hutu extremists who orchestrated the genocide. Randy Strash, a worker with the aid agency World Vision, arrived a few weeks later to find a “ghost town.”

“No gas stations, no stores, no communications,” he recalled. “Abandoned vehicles by the side of the road, riddled with bullets. At night, the sound of gunshots and hand grenades. It was something else.”

Mr. Strash set up his tent across the street from a camp where Mr. Kagame was quartered. Hutu fighters attacked the camp several times, trying to kill Mr. Kagame, Mr. Strash said. But it was not until a decade later, at an event at the University of Washington, that he met the Rwandan leader in person.

“Very polite and reasonable in his responses,” Mr. Strash recalled. “Clear, thoughtful and thought-provoking.”

Image
A portrait of Randy Strash, who is wearing a blue shirt and sitting on a beige couch.

Randy Strash, a former aid worker with World Vision, at home in Washington State. He recalled Mr. Kagame as “clear, thoughtful and thought-provoking” when they met years after the conflict.Credit...Grant Hindsley for The New York Times

Historical documents released by Human Rights Watch this past week show how much U.S. leaders knew about the slaughter as it unfolded. Writing to President Bill Clinton on May 16, 1994, the researcher Alison Des Forges urged him “to protect these defenseless civilians from murderous militia.”

Since coming to power, Mr. Kagame has had a reputation for spending aid wisely and promoting forward-looking economic policies. Although former aides have accused him of manipulating official statistics to exaggerate progress, Rwanda’s trajectory is impressive: Average life expectancy rose to 66 years from 40 years between 1994 and 2021, the United Nations says.

One of Mr. Kagame’s first acts was to publicly erase the dangerous divisions that had fueled the genocide. He banned the terms Hutu and Tutsi from identity cards and effectively criminalized public discussion of ethnicity. “We are all Rwandan” became the national motto.

But in reality, ethnicity continued to suffuse nearly every aspect of life, reinforced by Mr. Kagame’s policies. “Everyone knows who is who,” said Joseph Sebarenzi, a Tutsi who served as the president of Rwanda’s Parliament until 2000, when he fled into exile.

A survey published last year by Filip Reyntjens, a Belgian professor and outspoken Kagame critic, found that 82 percent of 199 top government positions were held by ethnic Tutsi — and nearly 100 percent in Mr. Kagame’s office. American diplomats reached a similar conclusion in 2008, after conducting their own survey of Rwanda’s power structure.

Mr. Kagame “must begin to share authority with Hutus to a much greater degree” if his country were to surmount the divides of the genocide, the U.S. Embassy wrote in a cable that was later published by WikiLeaks.


Rwanda Marks the Anniversary of the Genocide: The Country Is Still Grappling With Its Legacy (Published in 2019) https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/06/worl ... latedLinks
As world leaders have expressed regret over failing to stop the massacre of as many as one million people in Rwanda, its president, Paul Kagame, has entrenched his power and punished dissent.
April 5, 2024

Critics accuse Mr. Kagame of using the memory of the events of 1994 to suppress the Hutu majority.

Official commemorations mention “the genocide of the Tutsi” but play down or ignore the tens of thousands of moderate Hutus who were also killed, often trying to save their Tutsi neighbors.

A perception of selective justice rubs salt into those wounds. Mr. Kagame’s troops killed 25,000 to 45,000 people, mostly Hutu civilians, from April to August 1994, according to disputed U.N. findings. Yet fewer than 40 of his officers have been tried for those crimes, according to Human Rights Watch.

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A black-and-white image of men in military attire holding guns and hanging off a truck. The driver, bottom left, is wearing a hat and glasses.

Mr. Kagame, bottom left, as a commander of the Rwandan Patriotic Front, near Kigali in 1994.Credit...Gilles Peress/Magnum Photos

The Hutu killings are incomparable in scale or nature to the genocide. But Mr. Kagame’s lopsided approach to dealing with those events is hampering Rwandans’ ability to reconcile and move on, critics say.

“Anyone not familiar with Rwanda might think that everything is fine,” Mr. Sebarenzi said. “People work together, they go to church together, they do business together. That is good. But under the carpet, those ethnic divisions are still there.”

Although Mr. Kagame has appointed Hutus to senior positions in government since 1994, including prime minister and defense minister, those appointees have little real power, said Omar Khalfan, a former official with Rwanda’s national intelligence service who fled into exile in the United States in 2015.

Tutsi loyalists are planted in the offices of senior Hutus to keep an eye on them, said Mr. Khalfan, a Tutsi. “The regime doesn’t want to speak about ethnicity because it raises the issue of power-sharing,” he said. “And they don’t want that.”

In the West, Mr. Kagame is a firm favorite at gatherings of the global elite such as the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, where he met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine in January. But at home, those who publicly challenge him risk arrest, torture or death.

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Two people lighting a flame at a metallic structure. A crowd of people and a white tent are visible in the background.

Mr. Kagame and Jeannette Kagame, the first lady, lighting the flame at a genocide memorial in Kigali in 2022.Credit...Simon Wohlfahrt/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

A decade ago, Kizito Mihigo, a charismatic gospel singer, was among Rwanda’s most popular artists. A Tutsi who lost his parents in the genocide, Mr. Mihigo often sang at genocide commemorations and was said to be close to Mr. Kagame’s wife, Jeannette.

But on the 20th anniversary, Mr. Mihigo released a song that in coded lyrics called on Rwandans to show empathy for both Tutsi and Hutu victims — effectively, a call for greater reconciliation.

Mr. Kagame was furious. A presidential aide said he “didn’t like my song, and that I should ask him for forgiveness,” Mr. Mihigo recalled in 2016. If the singer refused to comply, he added, “they said I’d be dead.”

Mr. Mihigo apologized but was convicted on treason charges and imprisoned. Released four years later, he found he was blacklisted as a singer. In 2020, he was arrested again as he tried to slip across the border to Burundi and, four days later, found dead in a police station.

The government said Mr. Mihigo had taken his life, but few believed it. “He was a very strong Christian who believed in God,” said Ms. Ingabire, the opposition politician, who came to know Mr. Mihigo in prison. “I can’t believe this is true.”

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Kizito Mihigo wearing a brown blazer and facing the camera.

The Rwandan singer Kizito Mihigo in 2014.
Credit...Stephanie Aglietti/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Mr. Kagame’s reach extends across the globe. Rights groups have documented dozens of cases of Rwandan exiles being intimidated, attacked or assassinated by presumed agents of the state in at least a dozen countries, including Canada, Australia and South Africa.

Mr. Khalfan, the former intelligence officer, said he was approached at home in Ohio in 2019 by a man he identified as an undercover Rwandan agent. The man tried to lure him to Dubai — a similar ruse to the one that caused Paul Rusesabagina, a Hutu hotelier whose story featured in the movie “Hotel Rwanda,” to be tricked into returning to the country in 2020.

Mr. Rusesabagina was released from prison last year, after years of U.S. pressure. The episode only underscored how little real resistance Mr. Kagame faces at home. But a more immediate worry lies across the border, in eastern Congo.

There, the United States and the United Nations have publicly accused Rwanda of sending troops and missiles in support of M23, a notorious rebel group that swept across the territory in recent months, causing widespread displacement and suffering. The M23 has long been seen as a Rwandan proxy force in Congo, where Mr. Kagame’s troops have been accused of plundering rare minerals and massacring civilians. Rwanda denies the charges.

The crisis has cooled Mr. Kagame’s relations with the United States, his largest foreign donor, American officials say. Senior Biden administration officials traveled to Rwanda, Congo and, more discreetly, Tanzania in recent months in an effort to prevent the crisis from spiraling into a regional war. In August, the United States imposed sanctions on a senior Rwandan military commander for his role in backing the M23.

U.S. officials described tense, sometimes confrontational meetings between Mr. Kagame and senior American officials, including the U.S.A.I.D. administrator, Samantha Power, over Rwanda’s role in eastern Congo.

Mr. Kagame has often denied that Rwandan troops are in Congo, but he appeared to admit the opposite tacitly in a recent interview with Jeune Afrique magazine.

In justifying their presence, he fell back on familiar logic: that he was acting to prevent a second genocide, this time against the ethnic Tutsi population in eastern Congo.

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A view of two windows and the skulls of genocide victims in a case below.

The Ntarama Genocide Memorial in Kigali. As many as 800,000 people were killed in 1994.Credit...Jacques Nkinzingabo/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/06/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[swamidada]

The New Republic
Opinion
Trump Admits He Only Wants White People to Come to the U.S.
Hafiz Rashid
Mon, April 8, 2024 at 10:19 AM CDT·

Trump is bringing back his “greatest” hits on immigration in his current presidential campaign.

Remember in 2018, when he referred to immigrants from places such as Haiti as “people from shithole countries” and wondered why more immigrants weren’t coming from places like Norway? Well, at a private fundraiser over the weekend, Trump made a callback to those remarks, once again lamenting where immigrants to America come from.

At a multimillion-dollar event in Palm Beach, Florida, Trump complained that immigrants weren’t coming from “nice” countries “like Denmark,” according to The New York Times, which got an account of the event from one attendee. He even suggested that the wealthy guests at the event, hosted at a mansion owned by billionaire John Paulson, weren’t safe from nearby undocumented immigrants.

“These are people coming in from prisons and jails. They’re coming in from just unbelievable places and countries, countries that are a disaster,” Trump said, the Times reported.

“I said [in 2018], you know, ‘Why can’t we allow people to come in from nice countries, I’m trying to be nice,’” he continued, to reported chuckles from the crowd. “Nice countries, you know like Denmark, Switzerland? Do we have any people coming in from Denmark? How about Switzerland? How about Norway?”

The setting of the event was also interesting: Guests were seated outdoors at white-clothed tables under a white tent, looking out over the body of water that separates wealthy Palm Beach (98.3 percent white, according to census estimates) from the more diverse city of West Palm Beach, where nearly a third of the population is Black and almost a quarter is Hispanic.

“In fact, I don’t think they’re on this island, but I know they’re on that island right there. That’s West Palm,” Trump at one point said during his speech, gesturing across the water. “Congratulations over there. But they’ll be here. Eventually, they’ll be here.”

Trump also mentioned immigrants from the Middle East, noting that immigrants were arriving from Yemen, “where they’re blowing each other up all over the place.”

All of Trump’s rhetoric and policies have been based on racism from the time he began seriously campaigning for president in 2015. Who could forget his first campaign speech, after he descended his golden escalator? He claimed that Mexico was “sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists.”

Trump either fails to realize or refuses to admit that immigrants move to different countries for better lives, For example, his preferred origin for immigrants, Denmark, ranks sixth in the world in the United Nations’ Human Development Index, which is based on factors such as life expectancy, literacy rate, access to electricity, GDP per capita, income inequality, and others. In contrast, the U.S. is ranked twentieth.

https://currently.att.yahoo.com/news/tr ... 13182.html

[kmaherali]

‘More and more aligned’

The Houthis, the Iran-backed militia that controls much of Yemen, have disrupted the global economy by firing on commercial ships traveling through the Red Sea. But the Houthis have made some exceptions: Ships from China and Russia are allowed to pass without being attacked.

This policy, formalized with a diplomatic agreement last month, is the latest sign that the world has entered a new period of great power politics. On one side is the largely democratic alliance — including the United States, Japan, South Korea and Western Europe — that has dominated global affairs since the demise of the Soviet Union. On the other side are China, Russia, Iran and North Korea as well as Iran-backed groups like the Houthis.

These authoritarian powers “are more and more aligned,” Jens Stoltenberg, the head of NATO, the Western alliance, told the BBC this week. “They support each other more and more, in very practical ways.”

In today’s newsletter, I’ll explain how the emerging alliance is shaping the world and why experts are anxious about the future.

Money, weapons and propaganda

Over the past decade, the emerging anti-democratic alliance has become bolder and more coordinated. Among the examples:

- In the Ukraine war, China, Iran and North Korea have supplied crucial help to Russia. Iran and North Korea have sent weapons. And China has allowed Russia’s economy to overcome tough sanctions, as my colleague Ana Swanson has detailed. This economic aid offers military benefits, too: China is helping Russia rebuild its military-industrial base after two years of war.
- China and Russia also act as military allies beyond Ukraine. “China and Russia are pursuing the joint development of helicopters, conventional attack submarines, missiles and missile-launch early warning systems,” Hal Brands of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies recently wrote in Foreign Affairs.
- Iran and North Korea resumed their collaboration on missile technology during the Trump administration, according to the U.N. North Korea already has nuclear weapons, and Iran seems to want them.
- During the war in Gaza, Chinese and Russian groups have filled social media with posts supporting Hamas (which, like the Houthis, relies on Iranian support). Many include antisemitic tropes, such as Jewish control of the U.S. “The reason why China chose this moment to take a decisively anti-Israel position is because China regards Israel as a close ally of the West,” Miles Yu of the Hudson Institute told Congress.
- The Houthis have praised Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a global turning point. Ali al-Qahoum, a Houthi leader, said that the invasion had weakened “unipolarity” — a reference to American power — and promoted “multipolarity.”

A person watches as a ship crosses the Suez Canal.

A ship crosses the Suez Canal toward the Red Sea. Mohamed Hossam/EPA, via Shutterstock

Very different values

Al-Qahoum’s line underscores the larger goal of the China-led alliance. Above all, it wants to reduce American influence and allow regional powers to assert their will. China might then be able to take over Taiwan. Russia could again dominate parts of Eastern Europe. Iran could contest Saudi Arabia, a U.S. ally, for sway over the Middle East. (These Times maps, by Alissa Rubin and Lazaro Gamio, explain Iran’s ambitions.)

The countries in the anti-U.S. alliance, Brands wrote, aim “to reorder their regions and, thereby, reorder the world.” As Fumio Kishida, Japan’s prime minister, told Congress yesterday during a visit to Washington, “The international order that the U.S. worked for generations to build is facing new challenges, challenges from those with values and principles very different from ours.”

These other countries obviously have their differences: Iran, for instance, is an Islamic theocracy, while China and Russia have oppressed their own Muslim populations. But the countries nonetheless have overlapping worldviews.

All have authoritarian governments. All have patriarchal societies, with few women in senior roles. All restrict L.G.B.T. rights. None permit a free press. All imprison people, or worse, for criticizing the regime. The countries celebrate their hostility to liberal democracy and want to forge a world with less of it.

What’s next?

One possibility is that the world is entering a new cold war, with two broad alliances competing for power. Sometimes, this competition may lead to actual wars, in which the two alliances support opposite sides — but both take steps to avoid escalation. That describes the situation in Ukraine.

Another possibility is even more alarming: a global war. Noah Smith, writing in his Substack newsletter this week, argued that the chances of such an outcome were higher than many Americans recognized. This war could start either with a major event, such as a Chinese invasion of Taiwan, or almost accidentally.

Imagine if the Houthis killed many Americans in a Red Sea attack or a Russian missile somehow did so in Europe. Experts are especially worried about China’s harassment of Philippine ships in the South China Sea. In a White House meeting yesterday, President Biden discussed the threat with the leaders of the Philippines and Japan.

One problem, as Jim Sciutto of CNN pointed out in his new book, “The Return of Great Powers,” is that the guardrails that helped prevent a past world war seem weaker today. China and the U.S. don’t always communicate as well as Soviet and American officials once did, and proxy forces like the Houthis don’t always heed their sponsors.

The past several decades have included many agonizing problems around the world. Overall, though, it has been a remarkably peaceful period. Global deaths from armed conflicts have fallen to near their lowest levels in six centuries, and global poverty has plummeted. The future looks more frightening.

[kmaherali]

Why does this election matter?

Indians began voting on Friday in a multiphase general election that will continue until June 1. The vote, whose results will be announced on June 4, will determine the political direction of the world’s most populous nation for the next five years.

The election, for which turnout is usually high, is a mammoth undertaking described as the biggest peacetime logistical exercise anywhere.

Prime Minister Narendra Modi, whose power is well entrenched, is seeking a third term. In his decade at the helm, he has projected himself as a champion of India’s development, trying to address some of the basic failures — like antiquated infrastructure and a lack of clean water and toilets — that have held the country back from reaching its potential as a major power. But his push to reshape India’s secular democracy as a Hindu-first nation has aggravated the religious and ethnic fault lines in the huge, diverse country.

In a region of frequent political turmoil, India is deeply proud of its nearly undisrupted electoral democracy since its founding as a republic more than 75 years ago. While independent institutions have come under assault from Mr. Modi’s efforts to centralize power and the ruling party is seen as having an unfair advantage over political fund-raising, voting in India is still seen as free and fair, and results are generally accepted by candidates. But some opposition groups have raised concerns that electronic voting machines could be vulnerable to tampering.

How does India vote?

India has a parliamentary system of governance. The party or coalition holding a majority of the 543 seats in the lower house of the Parliament gets to form the government and appoint as prime minister one of its winning candidates.

The country has over 960 million eligible voters, about 470 million of them women. Turnout in the previous parliamentary election, in 2019, was 67 percent, the highest ever.

The votes are cast electronically across more than a million polling stations that require about 15 million employees during balloting. To reach every possible voter in Himalayan hamlets and isolated islands, election officials travel by any means possible, in railroads and helicopters, on horseback and boats.

India’s elections are the most expensive in the world, with political parties spending more than $7 billion in the 2019 parliamentary election, according to studies. That spending is expected to double in the current election. In a sign of how much of a factor money is, Indian authorities seized the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars before the last parliamentary election — in cash, gold, liquor and drugs — that they said was meant for bribing voters.

Who is running, and who is likely to win?

Mr. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party holds a strong majority in the 543-seat Parliament. The B.J.P. won 303 seats in 2019, and along with its coalition partners enjoyed a majority of 352 seats.

Although Indian elections are known to throw surprises, Mr. Modi’s B.J.P. is well placed to return to power. His party, relentless in trying to expand its base, is rich in cash and has strong election machinery. Mr. Modi has built on it a multipronged approach that offers something for nearly everyone: There is the wider emotional appeal of his Hindu majoritarian ideology for his main base, coupled with a broad range of welfare and infrastructure programs to win new constituencies for the B.J.P.

The opposition has struggled to match Mr. Modi’s appeal.

The Indian National Congress, the main opposition party, ruled India for decades, but it has been reduced to shadow of its former glory in two consecutive national elections. In 2019, it won only 52 seats.

In the lead-up to this parliamentary election, the opposition tried to unite as one bloc. The opposition parties have been brought together by fears that a third term for Mr. Modi, who has jailed many opposition party leaders and bogged down others in investigations, would further marginalize them.

But the opposition has struggled to pitch a cohesive ideological alternative beyond a criticism of Mr. Modi’s divisive politics, and its bickering over seat-sharing in constituencies has often spilled out in messy public fights.

When will we find out the results?

Because of India’s vast geography, the voting for the parliamentary election is happening over seven phases, from the first region casting its vote to the last. Scheduling is a tricky task, entailing trying to find a sweet spot that factors in climate extremes and is considerate of the frequent cultural and religious festivals across India.

After voting is completed on June 1, results will be tallied on June 4 and announced by the end of the day.

Where can I find more information?

Modi’s Power Keeps Growing, and India Looks Sure to Give Him More https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/19/worl ... ction.html

China Had a ‘Special Place’ in Modi’s Heart. Now It’s a Thorn in His Side. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/13/worl ... -modi.html

Modi’s Party Doesn’t Control All of India. But He’s Working on It. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/23/worl ... alism.html

What 10 Years of Modi Rule Has Meant for India’s Economy https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/01/busi ... ction.html

Modi Opens a Giant Temple in a Triumph for India’s Hindu Nationalists https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/22/worl ... emple.html

India Is Passing China in Population. Can Its Economy Ever Do the Same? https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/19/worl ... ation.html

Why Is Narendra Modi So Popular? Tune In to Find Out. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/21/worl ... -baat.html

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/03/16/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Chaos and oppression


Outside Columbia University. Adam Gray for The New York Times

Dueling priorities

Arnold Kling, an economist, published a book a decade ago that offered a way to think about the core difference between progressives and conservatives. Progressives, Kling wrote, see the world as a struggle between the oppressor and the oppressed, and they try to help the oppressed. Conservatives see the world as a struggle between civilization and barbarism — between order and chaos — and they try to protect civilization.

Like many frameworks, Kling’s is a simplification, and it’s easy to find exceptions. But his book has been influential because the framework often sheds light on political arguments.

The debate over pro-Palestinian protests at Columbia and other universities has become an example. If you want to understand why university leaders are finding the situation so hard to resolve, Kling’s dichotomy is useful: The central question for colleges is whether to prioritize the preservation of order or the desire of students to denounce oppression.

In today’s newsletter, I’ll lay out the cases of the dueling sides.

Confronting injustice

A man wearing a kippah on his head that looks like a watermelon.

A Jewish student wearing a watermelon kippah, a symbol of Gaza. Bing Guan for The New York Times

For the student protesters, the injustice in Gaza is so horrific that it takes precedence over almost anything else.

The death toll in Gaza since Oct. 7 is more than 30,000, the Gaza Ministry of Health reports. Entire neighborhoods are rubble. Israel has slowed the entry of basic supplies into Gaza, and many families are hungry. (My colleagues Vivian Yee and Bilal Shbair profiled two families trying to find their children enough to eat.)

The protesters view this suffering as an atrocity that demands action, much as Jim Crow laws, the Vietnam War and South African apartheid did for earlier students. In a statement yesterday, a pro-Palestinian group at Columbia cited as inspiration the anti-Vietnam War demonstrators who were killed at Kent State University in 1970.

If classes must be canceled and graduation ceremonies can’t happen, all the better, the students say. The disruptions will force the world to confront what the protesters describe as a genocide. “Big picture, genocide is happening, and this is where we stand,” one Columbia graduate student told the publication Hell Gate.

Many protesters specifically call for their universities to divest from companies that do business in Israel or help produce military equipment.

Some students have framed the debate as being about free speech, and free-speech principles do play a role. But I don’t think they are as central as Kling’s frame. Both sides, after all, have tried to restrict speech. Supporters of Israel have doxxed pro-Palestinian students and tried to penalize slogans like “From the river to the sea.” Pro-Palestinian protesters have ripped away Israeli and U.S. flags and tried to prevent pro-Israel students from speaking.

The protesters’ abiding principle is not freedom of speech. It is justice for the oppressed.

Preventing chaos

Tents set up in between large university buildings.

The “Gaza Solidarity Encampment.” Bing Guan for The New York Times

For the protesters’ critics, the breakdown of order is the central problem — because a community that descends into chaos can’t function.

Protesters have frequently violated colleges’ rules. They have erected tents in public places and overwhelmed those areas. Columbia has switched to hybrid classes because of the turmoil.

Even worse, some protests have involved harassment and violence. The University of Michigan had to cut short an honors ceremony for students. At Vanderbilt, more than 20 protesters stormed the president’s office, injuring a security guard and shattering a window. At Columbia, videos have shown protesters threatening Jewish students with antisemitic vitriol, including a sign talking about Hamas’s “next targets.”

If universities do not enforce their own rules against such behavior, the rules have no meaning, administrators fear. Other protesters, seeing their own causes as existential, could likewise halt normal life. Perhaps they would be climate activists or students outraged by China’s oppression of Uighurs — or even demonstrators with right-wing views unpopular on American campuses. If anti-abortion protesters were to take over a quad for days, would university administrators ignore their own campus rules?

Jason Riley, a Wall Street Journal columnist, has compared the protesters’ tactics to those of the white residents of Arkansas who tried to use physical intimidation to prevent the enforcement of a law they didn’t like: school desegregation. President Dwight Eisenhower responded by proclaiming that “disorderly mobs” could not triumph, Riley noted.

College administrators are not making such analogies. Many express sympathy for the protesters’ concerns. But some insist that society can’t function if people violate rules without consequence. “We cannot have one group dictate terms and attempt to disrupt important milestones like graduation to advance their point of view,” Minouche Shafik, Columbia’s president, wrote to the campus this week.

What’s next?

I recognize that not everybody will accept Kling’s framework for this debate. Pro-Palestinian students will say that Israel is the true source of disorder, while pro-Israel students will say that Hamas is the true oppressor.

Still, I think the Kling dichotomy captures the dilemma that university leaders face. The protests continue, and graduation season is approaching. Those leaders will have to make difficult decisions about what values to prioritize.

NYTimes Newletter

[kmaherali]

Chad Election 2024: What to Know

Why does this election matter?

Chad’s election on May 6 appears to offer voters a choice. But it’s been masterminded, analysts say, to produce a single outcome: to rubber-stamp the rule of the incumbent, Mahamat Idriss Déby, who is seeking to transform himself from military leader to civilian president.

Mr. Déby seized power three years ago after his father, Idriss Déby, who ruled Chad with an iron fist for three decades, was killed — apparently on the battlefield, fighting rebels trying to overthrow his government. His son’s succession to the presidency was a clear violation of the country’s Constitution.

Chad is a landlocked, arid country of 18 million people in Central Africa. Despite its wealth of natural resources, it is one of the world’s poorest nations.

Nevertheless, it is sheltering hundreds of thousands of refugees from the war in neighboring Sudan.

Chad is also part of a belt of African countries to have experienced coups in the past four years, stretching from coast to coast.

And it’s the first of the junta-led countries to hold an election. Mali’s government keeps delaying its promised vote. Last year Burkina Faso’s military president, Ibrahim Traore, indefinitely postponed an election planned for July 2024, saying it was “not a priority.” There is no end in sight for Guinea’s supposedly transitional government.

Chad has built a reputation as a dependable security partner for Western countries in their fight against Islamist militants, at a time when other countries are pushing out Western allies. It’s hosting hundreds of French troops after they were kicked out of neighboring Niger, and some American ones.

But some American troops are leaving after a letter from Chad’s Air Force chief ordered them to stop activities on an air base in the capital, Ndjamena, U.S. officials said recently — at least until after the election.

Who is running?

Mr. Déby — known by his nickname, Kaka — was supposed to be an interim leader, and promised not to run — but he’s at the top of the ballot. He is a four-star general who trained in Chad and France, and has three wives and many children.

His prime minister, Succès Masra, is also a candidate. Mr. Masra used to be the country’s best-known opposition leader and was living in exile until last year. But then he returned, made a deal with Mr. Déby and, since January, has led his government. Mr. Masra used to have considerable support but now many Chadians view him as a sellout.

Eight other candidates have been approved to run — but two key opposition leaders, Nassour Ibrahim Neguy Koursami and Rakhis Ahmat Saleh, were barred after the country’s constitutional council said there were “irregularities,” including allegations of forgery by Mr. Koursami. But most observers said they thought the council’s findings were politically motivated.

The other name absent from the ballot is that of Yaya Dillo, who had been the foremost opposition leader. In February, he was shot dead by security forces at his party’s headquarters — an assassination, his party said. Before that, dozens of protesters were killed in pro-democracy rallies.

When will we find out the results?

About a week after the election. If it goes to a runoff, that is to be held on June 22.

Who is going to win?

There has never been a free and fair election in Chad, and this one looks set to continue in that tradition. Analysts say the only path to Mr. Deby’s losing power is through a coup d’état.

But even if he wins the vote, don’t make the mistake of thinking he’s popular, said Lynda Iroulo, a scholar of international relations at Georgetown University in Qatar. Despite a conspicuous absence of elections, she said the juntas in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger enjoy considerably more popularity than Chad’s.

“Most of them have had some level of mass support,” she said, largely because they are trying to “cut off the French influence in their countries.”

Thousands of people have rallied in support of the juntas in each country. Not so in Chad. Nevertheless, Mr. Déby has made sure that no candidate with enough support to defeat him will participate.

“My whole life, I haven’t seen any change occurring,” said Julia Bealoum, a student in Ndjamena. “I think things will continue as before.”

What are the geopolitical factors?

Chad has not faced the same wave of international condemnation that followed the coups and democratic backsliding in other African countries. The African Union did not suspend Chad’s membership after the coup, or when Mr. Déby backtracked on his pledge not to run. When Mr. Dillo — the opposition leader — was killed, the United States and France said nothing.

President Emmanuel Macron of France even sent his special envoy to Ndjamena 10 days after Mr. Dillo’s death, to offer his “admiration” for the electoral process.

It was a far cry from the condemnation that met the coups in Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger — or their juntas’ subsequent failure to hold elections.

Many voters in Chad feel that Western countries call the shots, and are highly critical of France despite the two governments’ close relationship.

“I don’t think it’s possible for a country like Chad to organize a transparent election, because we are ruled by Western powers, especially France, who just look after their own interests,” said Richard Djitaingar, the owner of a small cellphone shop in Ndjamena.

Where can I find more information?

U.S. to Withdraw Troops From Chad, Dealing Another Blow to Africa Policy https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/25/us/p ... rawal.html

Opposition Leader in Chad Is Killed in a Shootout Months Before Elections https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/29/worl ... illed.html

Talking Peace in Sudan, the U.A.E. Secretly Fuels the Fight https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/worl ... -chad.html

Security Forces Open Fire on Protesters in Chad, Killing at Least 50 https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/21/worl ... tests.html

Mahamat Adamou contributed reporting from Ndjamena, Chad.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/30/worl ... -2024.html

[kmaherali]

Why the Protests Help Trump


Police officers and protesters near the City College of New York in Manhattan.Credit...Spencer Platt/Getty Images

These days, I think a lot about Donald Trump. When the monthly economic reports come out, I think: Will this help elect Donald Trump? And, I confess, I’ve started to ask myself the same question when I look at the current unrest on American college campuses over Israel and Gaza.

Now, I should say that I assume that most of the protesters are operating with the best of intentions — to ease the suffering being endured by the Palestinian people.

But protests have unexpected political consequences. In the 1960s, for example, millions of young people were moved to protest the war in Vietnam, and history has vindicated their position. But Republicans were quick to use the excesses of the student protest movement to their advantage. In 1966, Ronald Reagan vowed “to clean up the mess at Berkeley” and was elected governor of California. In 1968, Richard Nixon celebrated the “forgotten Americans — the nonshouters; the nondemonstrators” and was elected to the presidency. Far from leading to a new progressive era, the uprisings of the era were followed by what was arguably the most conservative period in American history.

This kind of popular backlash is not uncommon. For his latest book, “If We Burn,” the progressive journalist Vincent Bevins investigated 10 protest movements that occurred between 2010 and 2020 in places like Egypt, Turkey, Brazil, Ukraine and Hong Kong. He concluded that in seven of those cases, the results were “worse than failure. Things went backward.”

In Egypt in 2011, for example, about a million protesters gathered in Tahrir Square, thrilling the world with their calls for reforms and freedom. President Hosni Mubarak was toppled, but democracy did not replace his autocratic rule; the Muslim Brotherhood did.

In June 2013, millions of Brazilians took to the streets demanding better schools, cheaper public transportation and political reform. But, Bevins laments, “just a few years later, the country would be ruled by the most radically right-wing elected leader in the world, a man who openly called for a return to dictatorship and mass violence” — the über-Trumpian figure Jair Bolsonaro.

Why do these popular uprisings so often backfire? In his book, Bevins points to flaws in the way the protesters organize themselves. He notes that there are a few ways you can structure movements. The first is the Leninist way, in which power is concentrated in the supreme leader and his apparatus. Or there is the method used by the American civil rights movement, in which a network of hierarchically organized institutions work together for common ends, with clear leaders and clear followers.

Then there’s the kind of movement we have in the age of the internet. Many of these protesters across the globe are suspicious of vertical lines of authority; they don’t want to be told what to do by self-appointed leaders. They prefer leaderless, decentralized, digitally coordinated crowds, in which participants get to improvise their own thing.

This horizontal, anarchic method enables masses of people to mobilize quickly, even if they don’t know one another. It is, however, built on the shaky assumption that if lots of people turn out, then somehow the movement will magically meet its goals.

Unfortunately, an unorganized, decentralized movement is going to be good at disruption but not good at building a new reality. As Bevins puts it, “A diffuse group of individuals who come out to the streets for very different reasons cannot simply take power themselves.” Instead groups that have traditional organizational structures, like the strongman populists, rise up vowing to end the anarchy and restore order.

Today’s campus protesters share this weakness. When you have no formal organizational structure, you can’t control the message. The most outlandish comments — “Zionists don’t deserve to live” — get attention. When you have no formal organizational structure, you can’t be clear on basic positions. Does the movement, for example, believe in a two-state solution, or does it want to eliminate Israel and ethnically cleanse the region?

Worse, the protests reinforce the class dynamics that have undermined the Democratic Party’s prospects over the past few decades. As is well known, the Democrats have become the party of the educated and cultural elite, and the Republicans have become the party of the less educated masses. Students who attend places like Columbia and the University of Southern California are in the top echelons of cultural privilege.

If you operate in highly educated circles, it’s easy to get the impression that young people are passionately engaged in the Gaza issue. But a recent Harvard Youth Poll asked Americans ages 18 to 29 which issues mattered to them most. “Israel/Palestine” ranked 15th out of 16 issues listed. Other issues like inflation, jobs, housing, health care and gun violence were much more pressing to most young Americans.

Especially since 2016, it’s become clear that if you live in a university town or in one of the many cities along the coasts where highly educated people tend to congregate, you can’t use your own experience to generalize about American politics. In fact, if you are guided by instincts and values honed in such places, you may not be sensitive to the ways your movement is alienating voters in the working-class areas of Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan and Georgia. You may come across to them as privileged kids breaking the rules and getting away with it.

Over the past few decades, many universities have become more ideologically homogeneous and detached from the rest of the country. As my colleague Ross Douthat noted recently, Columbia students who study 20th-century thought in the “core curriculum” are fed a steady diet of writers like Frantz Fanon and Michel Foucault from one ideological perspective.

Writing in The Atlantic, George Packer quoted a letter that one Columbia student wrote to one of his professors: “I think universities have essentially stopped minding the store, stopped engaging in any kind of debate or even conversation with the ideologies which have slowly crept into every bit of university life, without enough people of good conscience brave enough to question all the orthodoxies. So if you come to Columbia believing in ‘decolonization’ or what have you, it’s genuinely not clear to me that you will ever have to reflect on this belief.”

These circles have become so insular that today’s progressive fights tend to take place within progressive spaces, with progressive young protesters attempting to topple slightly less progressive university presidents or organization heads. These fights invariably divide the left and unify the right.

Over my career as a journalist, I’ve learned that when you’re covering a rally, pay attention not just to protesters; pay attention to all those people who would never attend and are quietly disapproving. If you were covering the protests of the late 1960s, for example, you would have learned a lot more about the coming decades by interviewing George W. Bush than you would have by interviewing one of the era’s protest celebrities like Abbie Hoffman. Hoffman was more photogenic in the moment, but Bush, and all those turned off by the protests, would turn out to be more consequential.

Over the past few days, the White House and Senator Chuck Schumer have become more critical of lawbreaking protests. They probably need to do a lot more of that if we’re going to avoid “Trump: The Sequel.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/02/opin ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

The Limits of Moralism in Israel and Gaza



Foreign policy can make a mockery of moral certitude. You’re trying to master a landscape of anarchy policed by violence, where ideological differences make American polarization look like genial neighborliness, where even a superpower’s ability to impose its will dissolves with distance, where any grand project requires alliances with tyranny and worse.

This seems clear when you consider the dilemmas of the past. It’s why the “good war” of World War II involved a partnership with a monster in Moscow and the subjection of half of Europe to totalitarian oppression. It’s why the “bad war” of Vietnam was only escaped at the cost of betraying the South Vietnamese and making a deal with yet another monster in Beijing.

But in active controversies the tragic vision can seem like a cold way of looking at the world. Lean into it too hard, and you get accused of ignoring injustice or recapitulating the indifference that gave cover to past atrocities.

Sometimes those accusations have some bite. A “realist” foreign policy can slide from describing power to excusing depredations. It can underestimate the power of a righteous cause — as I underestimated, for instance, Ukraine’s capacity to defend itself in 2022.

But seeing statecraft as a tragic balancing of evils is still essential, especially amid the kind of moral fervor that attends a conflict like Israel’s war in Gaza. The alternative is a form of argument in which essential aspects of the world, being inconvenient to moral absolutism, simply disappear.

For example, reading the apologia for pro-Palestinian protests from certain left-wing intellectuals, you have a sense of both elision and exaggeration, a hype around Israeli moral failures — it's not enough for a war that yields so many casualties to be unjust, if it’s wrong it must be genocide — that ends up suppressing the harsh implications of a simple call for peace.

A representative passage, from Pankaj Mishra in The London Review of Books, describes many protesters as “motivated by the simple wish to uphold the ideals that seemed so universally desirable after 1945: respect for freedom, tolerance for the otherness of beliefs and ways of life; solidarity with human suffering; and a sense of moral responsibility for the weak and persecuted.”

No doubt many campus protesters have these motivations. The difficulty is that liberal “freedom” is on offer almost nowhere in the Middle East, certainly not in Gaza under Hamas’s rule, and the most challenging “otherness of beliefs” in this situation are the beliefs that motivated the massacres of Oct. 7.

Another difficulty is that some instigators of the protests, including some of the student groups that were at work immediately after Oct. 7, seem untroubled by this fact, and perfectly comfortable with supporting not just peaceful negotiation but a revolutionary struggle led by Islamist fanatics.

Which yields the moral dilemma the protests don’t acknowledge: Ending the war on the terms they want could grant a major strategic victory to the regional alliance dedicated to the murder of Israelis and their expulsion from the Middle East.

Maybe the Gaza war is unjust enough, and Israeli goals unachievable enough, that there’s no alternative to vindicating Hamas’s blood-soaked strategy. But you have to be honest about what you’re endorsing: a brutal weighing-out of evils, not any sort of triumph for “universally desirable” ideals.

Then a similar point applies to supporters of the Israeli war, for whom moral considerations — the evil of Hamas, the historical suffering of the Jewish people, the special American relationship with Israel — are invoked as an argument-ender in an inflexible way. We are constantly urged to “stand with Israel” when it’s unclear if Israel knows what it’s doing. Joe Biden’s administration is chastised for betrayal when it tries to influence Israel’s warmaking, even though the Israeli government’s decisions before and since Oct. 7 do not inspire great confidence.

Biden’s specific attempts to micromanage the conflict may be misguided or hamfisted. But it’s not misguided for America, an imperium dealing with multiplying threats, to decline to write a blank check for a war being waged without a clear plan for victory or for peace.

The alternative articulated by, for instance, Mitt Romney — “We stand by allies, we don’t second-guess them” — is not a serious policy for a hegemon balancing its global obligations. And the religious vision of the House speaker, Mike Johnson, and other Christian Zionists, where Israel’s re-founding is evidence of a providential plan, does not imply that Israeli governments are immune from strategic blunders. Go read the Book of Kings!

In each case, you have a desire that mirrors the impulse of the left-wing intellectuals — to make foreign policy easy by condensing everything to a single moral judgment. But the problems of the world cannot be so easily reduced.

Being cold-eyed and tragic-minded does not mean abandoning morality. But it means recognizing that often nobody is simply right, no single approach is morally obvious, and no strategy is clean.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/11/opin ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

The elections next door: Mexico’s cartels pick candidates, kill rivals

More than two dozen candidates have been killed leading up to the June 2 vote. Hundreds more have dropped out of their races.


Mexican Senate candidate Willy Ochoa walks with fellow Institutional Revolutionary Party candidates before a rally in San Juan Chamula, Mexico. (Victoria Razo for The Washington Post)

VILLA LAS ROSAS, Mexico — This time, Willy Ochoa brought reinforcements.

This time, unlike the last time, he’d be ready for cartel attacks. He was accompanied by three truckloads of national guard troops. Two state police cars with flashing red lights. He rode in his own bulletproof SUV, and had a complement of muscular bodyguards. One sat in the bed of a pickup truck, his eyes fixed on the sky.

“He’s making sure they don’t fire a bomb from a drone,” Ochoa explained.


This is what it’s like to run for the Senate today in Mexico. “You’re at risk every minute,” the candidate said.

Organized crime groups are turning Mexico’s elections into a literal battleground, making the campaign this year one of the deadliest in the country’s modern history. More than two dozen candidates have been killed leading up to the June 2 vote; hundreds have dropped out of the race. More than 400 have asked the federal government for security details. The campaign of intimidation and assassination is putting democracy itself at risk.

The armed groups’ goal is to install friendly leaders in local offices so they can better exploit Mexican communities. Once largely focused on shipping drugs to the United States, the cartels now also smuggle migrants, extort businesses and win contracts for firms they control. They want to name towns’ police chiefs and public works directors.


Ochoa greets supporters in San Juan Chamula. (Victoria Razo for The Washington Post)


Some of the candidate's security detail. (Victoria Razo for The Washington Post)

That makes controlling mayor’s offices crucial. But candidates for governor and Congress are at risk, too. In some areas, cartels wield so much power they can decide who can enter towns — or even what people may say out loud.

“They don’t like it when you talk about the organized crime violence, the extortion, the people forced out of their communities,” said Ochoa, running as the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) candidate to represent Chiapas state in the Senate. When his campaign announces visits to strife-torn areas, he said, “we receive threats and warnings to not come.”

He’d had his own brush with danger in February, when gunmen on motorcycles charged after him, following a campaign stop in a tense town. He wasn’t going to leave himself so vulnerable again.


Ochoa is welcomed with a Tzotzil ritual. (Victoria Razo for The Washington Post)


An altar awaits the arrival of the visiting politicians. (Victoria Razo for The Washington Post)

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador accuses the opposition and media of exaggerating the violence in places such as Chiapas. Yet even López Obrador’s protégé, presidential front-runner Claudia Sheinbaum, was stopped by masked men last month in a region of the state controlled by the Sinaloa cartel. The men warned her to “remember the poor people” and waved her through their checkpoint.

Assassins have targeted candidates from all of Mexico’s major parties. In Maravatío, a municipality of 80,000 in the central state of Michoacan, three candidates for mayor have been killed — two from Morena, López Obrador’s party, and one from the opposition National Action Party, or PAN.

Carlos Palomeque, head of the PAN in Chiapas, says nearly two dozen mayoral candidates from the party have dropped out of their races. It used to be the cartels bought off voters, he says. Now, “they force candidates from the race. It’s cheaper.”


An Ochoa advertisement promises “the peace of before with the supports of now.” (Victoria Razo for The Washington Post)

This year, a different campaign

Ochoa, 45, grew up campaigning. His father, an activist for farmworkers and other social causes, served in Congress. Ochoa loved going to his rallies, traveling from town to town, being part of the sweating, cheering crowds.

His own young sons aren’t getting that experience. Ochoa sent the pair out of state, along with his wife, earlier this year. “I have to keep them safe,” he said as his convoy rolled through the countryside. He pulled up their latest videos on his iPhone.

“Papa, I just prayed for you,” chirped the 7-year-old.

“Only 30 more days till you come back,” said the 9-year-old, smiling into the camera. “I hope you win the election!”

“My kids are adorable,” said Ochoa, and his voice quavered, and he took a big gulp of water.


Candidates greet rallygoers in San Juan Chamula. (Victoria Razo for The Washington Post)


Tzotzil men raise their hats in salute. (Victoria Razo for The Washington Post)

Ochoa’s been a state lawmaker, a federal congressman and a top official in the PRI. He’s used to the rough-and-tumble of politics, and the long history of ties between Mexican politicians and cartels. But early in the campaign, he realized how different this race would be. In February, he gave a speech in Villa Las Rosas, one of a string of towns near the Guatemalan border used by traffickers to store drugs.

As he left the stage, he said, he was surrounded by around 25 men, some armed. “We have instructions to take you to the man who rules this plaza,” or crime district, one said. Ochoa managed to slip away.

But around 45 minutes later, as he stopped for lunch, he spotted a line of armed men on motorcycles gunning toward the restaurant parking lot. Gunning for him. His bodyguards cocked their automatic rifles. The motorcyclists paused, perhaps waiting for reinforcements, and Ochoa and his convoy sped away.


A security guard at the Juquilita restaurant in Villa Las Rosas, where Ochoa was the target of a kidnapping attempt in February. (Victoria Razo for The Washington Post)


An armed man guards the restaurant where Ochoa eats in San Francisco Pujiltic. (Victoria Razo for The Washington Post)

Now, three months later, Ochoa was returning to Villa Las Rosas.

The walkie-talkie clipped to the seat back started squawking.

“The vehicle in front of us is acting as a cartel lookout,” one bodyguard was saying.

“That guy in a white cap is watching us.”

“Do you see the motorcycle? It’s 60 or 70 meters ahead.”

“They’re sending messages.”


Ochoa addresses supporters in San Juan Chamula. (Victoria Razo for The Washington Post)

‘They let different cartels in’

Chiapas, Mexico’s poorest state, burst into the headlines in 1994 when Indigenous peasants launched an armed uprising to demand justice. Led by Subcomandante Marcos, a telegenic, pipe-smoking intellectual, the Zapatista rebels won international sympathy.

Chiapas wasn’t known for cartel violence. Mexico’s lightly guarded southern border had long been a major entry point for U.S.-bound cocaine, and the state’s lush jungles provided cover for clandestine airstrips. But the Sinaloa cartel had a monopoly on drug trafficking, and kept things quiet.


Marilú watches Ochoa tour businesses and homes in Villa Las Rosas. (Victoria Razo for The Washington Post)


Mexican National Guard troops protect Ochoa's convoy as the candidate leaves Villa Las Rosas. (Victoria Razo for The Washington Post)

That’s changed in the last few years. Divisions have emerged in the cartel. Democracy has brought new political parties, which allegedly formed links with other trafficking groups. And the number of migrants crossing Mexico soared, fueling a lucrative people-smuggling industry in the border state.

Ochoa, whose party ran Mexico for seven decades in the last century, blames today’s violence on incompetent politicians.

“They let different cartels in,” he said. “They didn’t draw the line.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/20 ... -violence/

[kmaherali]

‘The Seeds Had Been Planted. Trump Didn’t Do It Himself.’

May 15, 2024
Senator Rick Scott, his face out of focus and partly out of frame, holds a microphone, with the words “truth” and “tradition” visible in yellow on the blue wall behind him. “Tradition” is largely blocked by the microphone.

Credit...Damon Winter/The New York Times

By Thomas B. Edsall

Mr. Edsall contributes a weekly column from Washington, D.C., on politics, demographics and inequality.

Over the past 30 years, authoritarianism has moved from the periphery to the center, even the core, of global politics, shaping not only the divide between left and right in the United States but also the conflict between the American-led alliance of democratic nations and the loose coalition of autocratic states including Russia, China, Iran and North Korea.

Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a co-author of “Authoritarianism and Polarization in American Politics,” has tracked the partisanship of white voters in this country who are in the top 15 percent on measures of support for dictatorial rule.

Replying by email to my inquiry, Hetherington wrote:

In 1992, those whites scoring at the top of the authoritarianism scale split their two-party vote almost evenly between Bush and Clinton (51 to 49). In 2000 and 2004, the difference becomes statistically significant but still pretty small.

By 2012, those high-authoritarianism white voters went 68 to 32 for Romney over Obama. In both Trump elections it was 80 to 20 among those voters.

So from 50 Republican-50 Democrat to 80 Republican-20 Democrat in the space of 24 years.

The parallel pattern of conflicting values and priorities that has emerged between nations is the focus of a paper published last month, “Worldwide Divergence of Values” by Joshua Conrad Jackson and Dan Medvedev, both at the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. The two authors analyzed data from seven studies conducted by the World Values Survey in 76 countries between 1981 and 2022.

Jackson and Medvedev found that over those years, “Values emphasizing tolerance and self-expression have diverged most sharply, especially between high-income Western countries and the rest of the world” and characterized this split as a clash between “emancipatory” values and values of “obedience.”

I asked Medvedev whether authoritarianism represents the antithesis of a regime based on emancipatory principles, and he wrote back, “It certainly does seem that authoritarian regimes tend to reject values that we categorize as emancipative.”

He said he would prefer to use the word “traditional” but “that’s just my preference — I don’t think it’s incorrect to use ‘authoritarian.’”

Jackson and Medvedev found that “the rate of value divergence” could be determined using seven questions producing “the highest divergence scores.” Those were:

(1) justifiability of homosexuality, (2) justifiability of euthanasia, (3) importance of obedience of children, (4) justifiability of divorce, (5) justifiability of prostitution, (6) justifiability of suicide and (7) justifiability of abortion.

I wrote Jackson and Medvedev, asking about this divergence:

There has been a lot of speculation lately about new global divide pitting democracies led by the United States against a coalition including China, Russia, Iran and North Korea. Does this divide show up in your data on values differences between countries? Are there values differences between democratic countries and autocratic countries?

“The short answer is yes,” Jackson and Medvedev wrote back and provided a detailed analysis in support of their reply.

Their data shows that the citizens in authoritarian countries tend to “believe that homosexuality and divorce are not justifiable” while those living in the United States, Japan, Germany and Canada “tend to believe that homosexuality and divorce are justifiable and disagree that obedience is an important value to teach their children.”

More important, Jackson and Medvedev found that over those years, Russia, China and Iran have moved in an increasingly authoritarian direction while the democratic countries have moved in an emancipatory direction.

“These cultural differences were not always so stark; they have emerged over time,” Jackson and Medvedev wrote. “These two groups of countries are sorting in their emancipative values over time. For example, Russia and the United States used to be quite similar in their values, but now the United States is closer to Germany in its values, and Russia is closer to Iran.”

There is a debate among scholars of politics over the level of centrality that authoritarianism warrants and the forces that have elevated its salience, especially in American politics, where high levels of authoritarianism are increasingly linked to allegiance to the Republican Party.

What is clear is that authoritarianism has become an entrenched factor in partisan divisions, in global conflicts between nations and in the politics of diversity and race.

Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment, wrote that the embedded character of authoritarianism in America “is like a barnacle attached to our affective polarization, a side effect of a political realignment being run through the uniquely polarizing effects of our first-past-the-post, winner-take-all system and primary structure.”

In an email, Kleinfeld argued that the Great Recession played a pivotal role in stressing the importance of authoritarianism in American politics:

In 2008, the financial crisis created a great deal of anger and a desire for more government intervention. At the same time, an identity revolution was taking place in which group identity gained increased salience, especially in America.

Together these movements opened space for a political realignment: a long-dissatisfied group of voters who were pro-economic redistribution, but only to their “deserving” group, found political voice. These “more for me, less for thee” voters who hold left-wing redistributive economic ideas and socially conservative views formed Trump’s primary base in 2016, and moved firmly into the Republican camp in 2020.

The two-party system in the United States, Kleinfeld contended, strengthens authoritarianism by failing to provide a vehicle specifically dedicated to the agenda of the disgruntled electorate. As a result, these voters turned en masse in 2016 to an autocratic leader, Donald Trump, who, in his own words, became their “retribution.”

This newly mobilized, angry electorate, Kleinfeld continued, is “not choosing the antidemocratic behavior — they are choosing their tribe, and the behavior comes with it. Authoritarian behavior is happening in America, not in Europe, because of our political structures.”

In support of her argument, Kleinfeld cited a January report issued by the Democracy Fund, “Democracy Hypocrisy: Examining America’s Fragile Democratic Convictions,” that shows how Americans can endorse democratic principles and simultaneously support autocratic behavior by fellow partisans.

Among the report’s conclusions:

While a vast majority of Americans claimed to support democracy (more than 80 percent said democracy is a fairly or very good political system in surveys from 2017 to 2022), fewer than half consistently and uniformly supported democratic norms across multiple surveys.

Support for democratic norms softened considerably when they conflicted with partisanship. For example, a solid majority of Trump and Biden supporters who rejected the idea of a “strong leader who doesn’t have to bother with Congress and elections” nonetheless said their preferred U.S. president would be justified in taking unilateral action without explicit constitutional authority under several different scenarios.

About 27 percent of Americans consistently and uniformly supported democratic norms in a battery of questions across multiple survey waves, including 45 percent of Democrats, 13 percent of Republicans and 18 percent of independents.

In contrast to an overwhelming and consistent rejection of political violence across four survey waves, the violent events of Jan. 6, 2021, were viewed favorably by many Republicans. Almost half of Republicans (46 percent) described these events as acts of patriotism, and 72 percent disapproved of the House select committee that was formed to investigate them.

While much of the focus on authoritarianism in the United States has been on Republican voters, it is also a powerful force in the Democratic electorate.

In their 2018 paper “A Tale of Two Democrats: How Authoritarianism Divides the Democratic Party,” five political scientists — Julie Wronski, Alexa Bankert, Karyn Amira, April A. Johnson and Lindsey C. Levitan — found that in 2016 “authoritarianism consistently predicts differences in primary voting among Democrats, particularly support for Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders.” More specifically, “as a Democrat in the Cooperative Election Study survey sample moves from the minimum value on the authoritarianism scale to the maximum value, the probability of voting for Clinton increases from 0.33 to 0.76.”

Wronski and her colleagues determined that “Republicans are significantly more authoritarian than Democrats” but “the variation in authoritarianism is significantly higher among Democrats than Republicans.” Put another way: The level of authoritarianism among the top half of Democrats is almost the same as it is among Republicans; the bottom half of Democrats demonstrates lower levels of authoritarianism than all Republicans.

One of the more intriguing discoveries is that growing racial diversity activates authoritarianism.

In their 2017 article “Racial Diversity and the Dynamics of Authoritarianism,” Yamil Ricardo Velez and Howard Lavine, political scientists at Yale and the University of Minnesota, determined that racial diversity “magnifies the political impact of individual differences in the psychological disposition of authoritarianism.”

“In white areas with minimal diversity, authoritarianism had no impact on racial prejudice, political intolerance and attitudes toward immigration,” they wrote. “As diversity rises, however, authoritarianism plays an increasingly dominant role in political judgment. In diverse environments, authoritarians become more racially, ethnically and politically intolerant and nonauthoritarians less so.”

Velez and Lavine defined authoritarianism as

a stable propensity concerned with minimizing difference and maximizing the “oneness and sameness” of people, ideas and behaviors or, more simply, as a preference for social conformity over individual autonomy. The worldview of authoritarians stresses conformity and obedience, as well as the belief that too much individual autonomy — and diversity in general — will result in social rebellion and instability of the status quo.

Authoritarians, Velez and Lavine wrote, “find diversity threatening, and they react to it with increasing racial resentment, anti-immigration beliefs and political intolerance. By contrast, nonauthoritarians react to diversity by becoming more politically tolerant and by embracing African Americans and immigrants.”

As issues “related to race and ethnicity, crime, law and order, religion and gender” have gained centrality, according to Velez and Lavine, “two fundamental changes have occurred in the nature of partisanship.”

The first is the creation of “an alignment between political identity and authoritarianism, such that high authoritarians have moved into the Republican Party and low authoritarians have moved into the Democratic Party.”

The second is that “the notion of partisan identities as social identities — defining what Democrats and Republicans are stereotypically like as people — has intensified, leading the two partisan groups to hold increasingly negative feelings about each other.”

As a result, the authors argued:

given that authoritarianism is (a) strongly linked to partisanship and (b) activated by ethnoracial diversity, it is likely that some of the “affective polarization” in contemporary American politics can be traced to authoritarianism. That is, perceptions of “us” and “them” have been magnified by the increasing alignment between party identification and authoritarianism.

Ariel Malka, a political scientist at Yeshiva University, contended in an email that there are further complications. “Public attitudes in Western democracies,” Malka wrote, “vary on a sociocultural dimension, encompassing matters like traditional versus progressive views on sexual morality, gender, immigration, cultural diversity and so on.”

Recently, however, Malka continued:

some evidence has emerged that the anti-immigrant and nativist parts of this attitude package are becoming somewhat detached from the parts having to do with gender and sexuality, especially among younger citizens. Indeed, there is a meaningful contingent of far-right voters who combine liberal attitudes on gender and sexuality with nativist and anti-immigrant stances.

What do these trends suggest politically? According to Malka:

As for how this relates to democratic preferences, citizens who hold traditional cultural stances on a range of matters tend, on average, to be more open to authoritarian governance and to violations of democratic norms. So there is some basis for concern that antidemocratic appeals will meet a relatively receptive audience on the right at a time of inflamed sociocultural divisions.

I asked Pippa Norris, a political scientist at Harvard, about the rising salience of authoritarianism, and she provided a summary of her forthcoming book, “The Cultural Roots of Democratic Backsliding.” In a description of the book on her website, Norris wrote:

Historical and journalistic accounts often blame the actions of specific strongman leaders and their enablers for democratic backsliding — Trump for the Jan. 6 insurrection in America, Modi for the erosion of minority rights in India, Netanyahu for weakening the powers of the Supreme Court in Israel and so on. But contingent narratives remain unsatisfactory to explain a general phenomenon, they fail to explain why ordinary citizens in longstanding democracies voted these leaders into power in the first place, and the direction of causality in this relationship remains unresolved.

Her answer, in two steps.

First:

Deep-rooted and profound cultural changes have provoked a backlash among traditional social conservatives in the electorate. A wide range of conventional moral values and beliefs, once hegemonic, are under threat today in many modern societies. Value shifts are exemplified by secularization eroding the importance of religious practices and teachings, declining respect for the institutions of marriage and the family and more fluid rather than fixed notions of social identities based on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, community ties and national citizenship. An extensive literature has demonstrated that the “silent revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s has gradually led to growing social liberalism, recognizing the principles of diversity, inclusion and equality, including support for issues such as equality for women and men in the home and work force, recognition of L.G.B.T.Q. rights and the importance of strengthening minority rights.

These trends, in turn, have “gradually undermined the majority status of traditional social conservatives in society and threatened conventional moral beliefs.”

Second:

Authoritarian populist forces further stoke fears and exploit grievances among social conservatives. If these political parties manage to gain elected office through becoming the largest party in government or if their leaders win the presidency, they gain the capacity to dismantle constitutional checks and balances, like rule of law, through processes of piecemeal or wholesale executive aggrandizement.

For a detailed examination of the rise of authoritarianism, I return to Hetherington, the political scientist I cited at the start of this column. In his email, Hetherington wrote:

The tilt toward the Republicans among more authoritarian voters began in the early 2000s because the issue agenda began to change. Keep in mind, so-called authoritarians aren’t people who are thirsting to do away with democratic norms. Rather they view the world as full of dangers. Order and strength are what, in their view, provide an antidote to those dangers. Order comes in the form of old traditions and conventions as well. When they find a party or a candidate who provides it, they support it. When a party or candidate wants to break from those traditions and conventions, they’ll oppose them.

Until the 2000s, the main line of debate had to do with how big government ought to be. Maintaining order and tradition isn’t very strongly related to how big people think the government ought to be. The dividing line in party conflict started to evolve late in the 20th century. Cultural and moral issues took center stage. As that happened, authoritarian-minded voters, looking for order, security and tradition, moved to the Republicans in droves. When people talk about the Republicans attracting working-class whites, these are the specific working-class whites that the G.O.P.’s agenda attracted.

As such, the movement of these voters to the G.O.P. long predated Trump. His rhetoric has made this line of conflict between the parties even sharper than before. So that percentage of high-scoring authoritarian voters for Trump is higher than it was for Bush, McCain and Romney. But that group was moving that way long before 2016. The seeds had been planted. Trump didn’t do it himself.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/15/opin ... cracy.html

[kmaherali]

The Authoritarians Have the Momentum



The central struggle in the world right now is between liberalism and authoritarianism. It’s between those of us who believe in democratic values and those who don’t — whether they are pseudo-authoritarian populists like Donald Trump, Viktor Orban, Narendra Modi or Recep Tayyip Erdogan or straight-up dictators like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping or theocratic fascists like the men who run Iran and Hamas.

In this contest, we liberals should be wiping the floor with those guys! But we’re not. Trump is leading in the swing states. Modi seems to be on the verge of re-election. Russia and Iran are showing signs of strength.

Over the last two centuries liberalism has evolved into a system that respects human dignity and celebrates individual choice. Democratic liberalism says we don’t judge how you want to define the purpose of your life; we just hope to build fair systems of cooperation so you can freely pursue whatever goals you individually choose. Liberalism tends to be agnostic about the purposes of life and focused on processes and means: rule of law, the separation of powers, free speech, judicial review, free elections and the rules-based international order.

In his stirring and clarifying new book, “Liberalism as a Way of Life,” Alexandre Lefebvre argues that liberalism isn’t merely a set of neutral rules that allow diverse people to live together; liberalism, he writes, has also become a moral ethos, a guiding philosophy of life. As other moral systems, like religion, have withered in many people’s lives, liberalism itself has expanded to fill the hole in people’s souls.

Liberals honor individuals’ right to see themselves with self-respect; racial slurs have become our form of blasphemy because they assault this sense of self-respect. Liberal morality tends to be horizontal — pure liberals don’t look upward to serve a living God; they look sideways and try to be kind and decent to their fellow human beings.

Pure liberals place a high value on individual consent; any kind of sex or family arrangement is OK so long as everybody agrees to it. At one point Lefebvre has a nice little riff on all the traits that make us liberals pleasant to be around. We respect autonomy and personal space, dislike hypocrisy and snobbery, and strive to achieve a live-and-let-live tolerance.

But I confess that I finished the book not only with a greater appreciation of liberalism’s strengths but also more aware of why so many people around the world reject liberalism, and why authoritarianism is on the march.

Liberal societies can seem a little tepid and uninspiring. Liberalism tends to be nonmetaphysical; it avoids the big questions like: Why are we here? Who made the cosmos? It nurtures the gentle bourgeois virtues like kindness and decency but not, as Lefebvre allows, some of the loftier virtues, like bravery, loyalty, piety and self-sacrificial love.

Liberal society can be a little lonely. By putting so much emphasis on individual choice, pure liberalism attenuates social bonds. In a purely liberal ethos, an invisible question lurks behind every relationship: Is this person good for me? Every social connection becomes temporary and contingent. Even your attitude toward yourself can be instrumentalized: I am a resource I invest in for desired outcomes.

When societies become liberal all the way down, they neglect a core truth: For liberal societies to prosper they need to rest on institutions that precede individual choice — families, faiths, attachments to a sacred place. People are not formed by institutions to which they are lightly attached. Their souls and personalities are formed within the primal bonds to this specific family, that specific ethnic culture, this piece of land with its long history to my people, to that specific obedience to the God of my ancestors.

These life-altering attachments are usually not individually chosen. They are usually woven, from birth, into the fabric of people’s being — into their traditions, cultures and sense of personhood.

The great Rabbi Jonathan Sacks explained the difference between the sort of contracts that flourish in the world of individual choice and covenants that flourish best in those realms that are deeper than individual utility: “A contract is about interests. A covenant is about identity. It is about you and me coming together to form an ‘us.’ That is why contracts benefit, but covenants transform.”

The great strength of the authoritarians who oppose liberal principles, from Trump to Xi to Hamas, is that they play straight into the primordial sources of meaning that are deeper than individual preference — faith, family, soil and flag. The authoritarians tell their audiences that the liberals want to take all that is solid — from your morality to your gender — and reduce it to the instability of a personal whim. They tell their throngs that the liberals are threatening their vestigial loyalties. They continue: We need to break the rules in order to defend these sacred bonds. We need a strongman to defend us from social and moral chaos.

These have proved to be powerful arguments. One recent Reuters/Ipsos poll found that 52 percent of Republicans believe that America needs “a strong president who should be allowed to rule without too much interference from courts and Congress.”

We could be living in a year in which authoritarians take or keep power in nations across Europe, Latin America and in the U.S., while Putin continues to make advances in Ukraine and Hamas survives the war in Gaza. In short, the authoritarians still have the momentum on their side.

Worse, liberalism has prompted a counterreaction in our societies. Many people find themselves spiritually unfulfilled; they feel naked, embattled and alone. So they grasp at politics to fill that moral and spiritual void. They grasp at politics to give them the sense of belonging, moral meaning and existential purpose that faith, family, soil and flag provided to their ancestors. In so doing they transform politics from a prosaic way to negotiate differences into a holy war in which my moral side is vindicated and your immoral side is destroyed. Politics begins to play a totalizing and brutalizing role in their personal lives and in our national life. They are asking more of politics than politics can deliver.

If liberalism is to survive this contest, we have to celebrate liberalism while acknowledging its limits. It’s a great way to construct a fair society to help diverse people live together in peace. But liberalism cannot be the ultimate purpose in life. We need to be liberals in public but subscribe to transcendent loyalties in the depth of our being — to be Catholic, Jewish, stoic, environmentalist, Marxist or some other sacred and existential creed. People need to feel connected to a transcendent order; nice rules don’t satisfy that yearning.

Liberal politicians need to find ways to defend liberal institutions while also honoring faith, family and flag and the other loyalties that define the purposes of most people’s lives. I feel that American presidents from, say, Theodore Roosevelt to Ronald Reagan knew how to speak in those terms. We need a 21st-century version of that.

If liberals are merely nice and tolerant, and can’t talk about the deepest and most sacred cares of the heart and soul, which seem so threatened to so many, then this is going to be an ugly election year.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/16/opin ... rians.html

[kmaherali]

‘We’ll See You at Your House’: How Fear and Menace Are Transforming Politics

Public officials from Congress to City Hall are now regularly subjected to threats of violence. It’s changing how they do their jobs.


Representative Jamie Raskin, Democrat of Maryland, played a leading role in former President Donald J. Trump’s second impeachment hearing. He said he received about 50 menacing calls, emails and letters every month that he turned over to the Capitol Police.Credit...Maansi Srivastava/The New York Times

One Friday last month, Jamie Raskin, a Democratic congressman from Maryland, spent a chunk of his day in court securing a protective order.

It was not his first. Mr. Raskin, who played a leading role in Donald J. Trump’s second impeachment hearing, said he received about 50 menacing calls, emails and letters every month that are turned over to the Capitol Police.

His latest court visit was prompted by a man who showed up at his house and screamed in his face about the Covid-19 vaccine, Mr. Trump’s impeachment and gender-related surgeries. Nearly two years earlier, the same man, with his 3-year-old son in his arms, had yelled profanities at Mr. Raskin at a July 4 parade, according to a police report.

“I told the judge I don’t care about him getting jail time. He just needs some parenting lessons,” Mr. Raskin said.

Mr. Raskin was far from the only government official staring down the uglier side of public service in America in recent weeks. Since late March, bomb threats closed libraries in Durham, N.C.; Reading, Mass.; and Lancaster, Pa., and suspended operations at a courthouse in Franklin County, Pa. In Bakersfield, Calif., an activist protesting the war in Gaza was arrested after telling City Council members: “We’ll see you at your house. We’ll murder you.”

A Florida man was sentenced to 14 months in prison for leaving a voice mail message promising to “come kill” Chief Justice John Roberts.

And Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, refused to rule out violence if he were to lose in November. “It always depends on the fairness of the election,” he said in an interview late last month.

This was just a typical month in American public life, where a steady undercurrent of violence and physical risk has become a new normal. From City Hall to Congress, public officials increasingly describe threats and harassment as a routine part of their jobs. Often masked by online anonymity and propelled by extreme political views, the barrage of menace has changed how public officials do their work, terrified their families and driven some from public life altogether.

By almost all measures, the evidence of the trend is striking. Last year, more than 450 federal judges were targeted with threats, a roughly 150 percent increase from 2019, according to the United States Marshals Service. The U.S. Capitol Police investigated more than 8,000 threats to members of Congress last year, up more than 50 percent from 2018. The agency recently added three full-time prosecutors to handle the volume.

More than 80 percent of local officials said they had been threatened or harassed, according to a survey conducted in 2021 by the National League of Cities.

“People are threatening not just the prosecutor, the special counsel, the judge but also family members,” said Ronald L. Davis, director of the U.S. Marshals Service. Lisa Monaco, the deputy attorney general, said she saw “an environment where disagreement is increasingly tipping over” into “violent threats.”

It is still rare for those threats to tip into action, experts said, but such instances have increased. Some capture national attention for weeks. The mass shootings at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh in 2018 and the Tops Friendly supermarket in Buffalo in 2022 were both carried out by perpetrators who expressed extreme right-wing views. Trump supporters’ riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was one of the largest acts of political violence in modern American history.

ImagePeople wave flags and crowd on to the steps at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Trump supporters’ riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was one of the largest acts of political violence in modern American history.Credit...Jason Andrew for The New York Times

Others — including an Ohio man’s shootout with state troopers after the F.B.I. searched Mr. Trump’s home and shootings at the homes of Democratic officials in New Mexico — fall out of the headlines quickly.

Surveys have found increasing public support for politicized violence among both Republicans and Democrats in recent years. A study released last fall by the University of California, Davis, found that nearly one in three respondents considered violence justified to advance some political objectives, including “to stop an election from being stolen.”

“Although actual acts of political violence in America are still quite low compared to some other countries, we’re now in a position where there has been enough violence that the threats are credible,” said Rachel Kleinfeld, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace who studies political violence.

Violence — and the threat of it — has been a part of American politics since the nation’s founding. But experts describe this moment as particularly volatile, thanks in great part to social media platforms that can amplify anonymous outrage, spread misinformation and conspiracy theories and turn a little-known public employee into a target.

No politician has harnessed the ferocious power of those platforms like Mr. Trump. The former president has long used personal attacks as a strategy to intimidate his adversaries. As he campaigns to return to the White House, he has turned that tactic on the judges and prosecutors involved in his various legal cases, all of whom have subsequently been threatened.

Democrats by and large have been the loudest voices in trying to quell political violence, although many on the right have accused them of insufficiently condemning unruly left-wing protesters on college campuses and at the homes of Supreme Court justices. After Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York, warned in 2020 that Supreme Court justices would “pay the price” if they eliminated federal abortion rights, Chief Justice Roberts called the statement “dangerous.”

Researchers say the climate of intimidation is thriving on political division and distrust, and feeding off other social ills — including mental illness, addiction and prejudice. Women are more commonly threatened than men, as are people of color, according to a Princeton University survey of local officials.

There is little research on the political views of those behind the onslaught of abuse. Some surveys show that Republican officeholders are more likely to report being targeted, often from members of their own party. Research does show, however, that recent acts of political violence are more likely to be carried out by perpetrators aligned with right-wing causes and beliefs.

Public officials at all levels are changing how they do their jobs in response. Many report feeling less willing to run again or seek higher office, and some are reluctant to take on controversial issues. Turnover among election workers has spiked since 2020; even librarians describe feeling vulnerable.

“These attacks are not coming from people who are looking for solutions,” said Clarence Anthony, the executive director of the National League of Cities. “They’re looking for confrontation.”

Joe Chimenti started getting death threats about a year after he took office as chairman of the board of supervisors in Shasta County, Calif., in 2019.
The normally sleepy county in Northern California had been thrown into tumult by a wave of anti-government sentiment that started with the coronavirus pandemic. It grew worse after Mr. Trump falsely claimed that the 2020 election had been stolen.

Image
Joe Chimenti stands near a tree wearing a blue shirt.

Joe Chimenti stepped down as chairman of the board of supervisors in Shasta County, Calif., after violent threats and constant disruptions at meetings.Credit...Emily Najera for The New York Times

Tired of violent threats and constant disruptions at meetings, Mr. Chimenti, a Republican, decided not to run for a second term. Elected in his place was a man who had repeated conspiracy theories about voting machines and who tried to hire a county executive who had called on Shasta County to secede from California.

Mr. Chimenti said he’d had enough of the abuse. “I got into this to make a difference, but I thought, Why do I want to put up with this?”

‘I Just Don’t Answer My Phone'

Image
Fred Upton sits in front of bookshelves full of photos, books and mementos.

Fred Upton, who served as a Republican representative from Michigan for 36 years, received so many threats from his vote to impeach former President Donald J. Trump that he asked the police to set up cameras outside his home.Credit...Lexey Swall for The New York Times

Fred Upton, who served as a Republican representative from Michigan for 36 years, was used to taking heat from the public. But he had never experienced anything like the backlash from his decision to vote to impeach Mr. Trump for his role in the Jan. 6 Capitol attack.

He received so many threats that he asked the local police to set up motion-activated cameras outside his home in Michigan. He installed panic buttons in his district offices and stopped notifying the public in advance of his speaking engagements. He also added a second exit door to his House office in Washington in case he or his staff needed to escape from an intruder.

After he voted in favor of President Biden’s infrastructure bill in late 2021, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a fellow Republican, called him a traitor and posted his office number on her social media accounts.

“I hope you die,” one caller said in a voice mail message he received soon after. “I hope everybody in your [expletive] family dies.”

When Mr. Upton left office after his district was redrawn, he assumed the threats would stop. But he continues to receive menacing calls and letters at his home in Western Michigan.

“I just don’t answer my phone anymore, ever,” he said.

Political violence in American is not new. Left-wing activists set off bombs in the Capitol in 1983 and in 1971; five lawmakers were shot by Puerto Rican nationalists in the House chamber in 1954; a pro-German professor planted a bomb in a Senate reception room in 1915. Four presidents have been assassinated.

For decades after the Civil War, it was common for white Southerners to threaten Republican lawmakers, said Kate Masur, a professor of history at Northwestern University. “It’s hard for us to imagine how violent the United States was in the 19th century.”

But researchers view the internet as a new accelerant. Nearly three-quarters of all threats are not made in person, according to a recent Princeton analysis, making it difficult for law enforcement to identify the source.

Technology has facilitated other forms of often-anonymous harassment as well. “Swatting” — making hoax 911 calls designed to set off a police response to a target’s home — has become more common, with a spate of recent incidents involving lawmakers, mayors, judges and the special counsel investigating Mr. Trump. In January, Jay Ashcroft, the Republican secretary of state in Missouri, was ordered from his house at gunpoint by armed officers responding to a bogus call that there had been a shooting at his home. No one has been charged in the event.

“Doxxing,” or publishing personal information online — thus giving people an opportunity to harass or threaten — has been used against a wide range of public officials and even jurors in the Trump cases.

For federal lawmakers, the prospect of physical harm has long been part of the job — one that was painfully illustrated by the shooting in 2011 that gravely wounded Gabby Giffords, then an Arizona congresswoman, and by the assault on the Republican congressional baseball team in 2017 by a gunman upset by Mr. Trump’s election. On Friday, the man who had broken into the home of Nancy Pelosi, the former House speaker, and bludgeoned her husband with a hammer was sentenced to 30 years in prison.

Many public officials say they have become accustomed to managing their fears and insist they are not affected. But there is evidence that the threats and intimidation can influence decisions.

Senator Mitt Romney, a Republican from Utah who is retiring at the end of this year, told a biographer that some G.O.P. lawmakers voted not to impeach and convict Mr. Trump after the Jan. 6 attack because they were afraid for their safety if they crossed his supporters. Mr. Romney did not identify the legislators by name and declined an interview for this article.

Andrew Hitt, the former head of the Republican Party in Wisconsin, agreed to go along with the Trump campaign’s failed scheme to overturn the 2020 election because he was “scared to death,” he told “60 Minutes.”

“It was not a safe time,” he said.

‘Who Is the WORST?’

Image
Donald Trump stands behind metal barricades in a hallway.

Mr. Trump has been relentless in attacking the judges overseeing his criminal and civil cases.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York Times

Four days after Mr. Trump was indicted in August in a federal election interference case, the presiding judge, Tanya S. Chutkan, received an alarming voice mail message at her chambers.

“If Trump doesn’t get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you,” the caller said, according to court documents.

Investigators tracked the message to Abigail Jo Shry, a 43-year-old Texas woman who was already facing state charges related to similar threats against two Texas state senators, a Democrat and a Republican.

Ms. Shry has a history of drug and alcohol abuse and “gets all her information from the internet,” her father testified. “You can get anything you want to off the internet. And, you know, it will work you up.” (Ms. Shry’s lawyer declined to comment.)

Mr. Trump has been relentless in attacking the judges overseeing the criminal and civil cases that have confronted him of late. Last month, he asked, “Who is the WORST, most EVIL and most CORRUPT JUDGE?” in a social media post that named the judges.

They are being inundated. At least three of them, including Judge Chutkan, have been swatted. In February, a woman was sentenced to three years in prison for threatening Judge Aileen Cannon, who is overseeing the federal criminal case against Mr. Trump involving mishandling classified documents.

Last month, a resident of Lancaster, N.Y., pleaded guilty to making death threats against Judge Arthur F. Engoron, who presided over a civil fraud trial against Mr. Trump in Manhattan this year, as well as threats against Letitia James, the New York attorney general, who brought the case.

The judges have been clear that Mr. Trump’s posts make an impact. “When defendant has publicly attacked individuals, including on matters related to this case, those individuals are consequently threatened and harassed,” Judge Chutkan wrote in a gag order trying to limit Mr. Trump’s public remarks.

The prospect of being a target for abuse has already deterred some from participating in cases involving Mr. Trump. During a February court hearing in Atlanta, former Gov. Roy Barnes of Georgia, a Democrat, said that Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, had asked him to lead the prosecution of Mr. Trump for election interference in Georgia.

Mr. Barnes declined, explaining: “I wasn’t going to live with bodyguards for the rest of my life.”

Ms. Willis has left her home amid threats, and the county pays about $4,000 a month for her new housing. Her staff was outfitted with bulletproof vests. This month, a Californian was indicted after threatening in the comment section of a YouTube video to kill her “like a dog.”

Intimidation Close to Home
Image
Natalie Adona poses for a portrait at her desk. She is wearing a brown shirt and a turquoise necklace.

Natalie Adona, the county clerk and recorder in Nevada County, Calif., and her staff received threats in 2022 from people who disagreed with mask-wearing protocols.Credit...Emily Najera for The New York Times

Local officials are feeling the pressure.

Election officials — from secretaries of state to poll workers — have faced hostility and abuse after Mr. Trump’s false claims of fraud in the 2020 election, leading to resignations and difficulty recruiting and retaining staff members and volunteers. Such threats “endanger our democracy itself,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said this week.

Local libraries have also become targets amid a heated campaign to ban books and cancel events aimed at members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community. Bomb threats were reported by 32 of the American Library Association’s member institutions last year, compared with two the year before and none in 2021.

Carolyn Foote, a retired librarian in Austin, Texas, who co-founded a group that supports librarians, said her members had become used to being called “pedophile, groomer, pornographer.”

Proving that ugly and hostile language has crossed the line from First Amendment-protected speech to credible threat can be difficult. Experts say prosecutions became even harder last year after the Supreme Court raised the bar for what qualifies as a credible threat, ruling that the person making the threat has to “have some subjective understanding of the threatening nature of his statements.”

In Bakersfield, Calif., a lawyer for Riddhi Patel, the activist who spoke of murdering City Council members after urging them to take up a Gaza cease-fire resolution, said her statement was not a crime. She has pleaded not guilty to 21 felony charges.

“It’s clear that this was not a true criminal threat, which under California law must be, among other things, credible, specific, immediate and unconditional,” said Peter Kang, the public defender of Kern County, which includes Bakersfield. “Instead, what we hear are Ms. Patel’s strong, passionate expressions, which fall within the bounds of constitutionally protected speech.”

Local officials say they have become accustomed to dealing with vitriol and anger that they can do little about. In Nevada County, Calif., Natalie Adona, the county clerk and recorder, said employees received a barrage of threats in 2020 from people who did not accept the election results, and again in 2022 over a mask mandate.

Ms. Adona said the county secured a restraining order against one of three people who forced their way into the building. But her staff has had to learn to endure and defuse confrontations.

“A lot of what we have experienced falls into this gray area,” Ms. Adona said. “It makes you look over your shoulder.”

Kitty Bennett contributed research

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/19/us/p ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

After Raisi’s Death, Hard-Liners Are Expected to Keep Grip on Power

The death in a helicopter crash of Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, disrupts a careful effort at a smooth transition to a new supreme leader to replace the aging Ali Khamenei.


A banner with a picture of President Ebrahim Raisi of Iran on Monday in Tehran. He had been seen as a top candidate to be the country’s next supreme leader. Credit...Majid Asgaripour/Wana News Agency, via Reuters

The sudden death of Iran’s president, Ebrahim Raisi, opens a new chapter of instability just as the increasingly unpopular Islamic Republic is engaged in selecting its next supreme leader. Mr. Raisi, 63, had been considered a prime candidate, especially favored by the powerful Revolutionary Guards.

Even before the helicopter crash that killed Mr. Raisi, the regime had been consumed with internal political struggles as the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, 85, the longest-serving head of state in the Middle East, is in declining health.

But given the Islamic Republic is facing internal protests, a weak economy, endemic corruption and tensions with Israel, analysts expect little change in Iran’s foreign or domestic policies. Ayatollah Khamenei has set the direction for the country, and any new president will not alter it much.

The system is “already on a trajectory to make sure that the successor of the supreme leader is completely in line with his vision for the future of the system,” said Ali Vaez, the Iran director at the International Crisis Group.

He described “a pretty hard-line vision” in which crucial areas of foreign policy, like support for regional proxy militias and developing components for a nuclear weapon, are not going to change.

Whoever is chosen as the next president, Mr. Vaez said, “has to be someone who falls in line with that vision, a subservient figurehead.”

Ellie Geranmayeh, an Iran expert with the European Council on Foreign Relations, also sees continuity on major foreign policy issues, including regional affairs and the nuclear program. “These files have been under the control of Iran’s supreme leader and the I.R.G.C.,” she said, referring to the Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, “with Raisi having little influence during his tenure as president.”

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“Raisi was certainly useful to some I.R.G.C. factions,” Ms. Geranmayeh said. Unlike his predecessor, Hassan Rouhani, Mr. Raisi, a more conservative loyalist, “did not challenge the I.R.G.C. either on domestic or foreign policy issues,” she said.

But criticism of Mr. Raisi’s performance as president had already raised questions about whether he was the best candidate to succeed Ayatollah Khamenei, she said.

Mr. Raisi’s main rival was considered to be Ayatollah Khamenei’s son Mojtaba, 55, whose candidacy has been harmed by the aura of a monarchical succession.

Image
Mojtaba Khamenei, wearing clerical clothes, at a protest with other men.

Mojtaba Khamenei, center, the son of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in 2019. He is seen as a potential successor to his father.Credit...Saeid Zareian/DPA, via Associated Images

With previous supreme leaders arguing that hereditary rule under the shah was illegitimate, “they would be hard-pressed to sell hereditary leadership to the Iranian people now,” said Shay Khatiri, a senior fellow at the Yorktown Institute, a research institution focused on superpower competition.

Mr. Raisi’s death may give Mojtaba Khamenei an easier path to succeed his father. But the internal workings of Iran’s religious and domestic politics are deliberately mysterious, and the decision in the end will be made by a council of senior clerics known as the Assembly of Experts. Though Mojtaba Khamenei, himself a cleric, is considered to be a favorite of the clergy, the assembly may yet decide to pick one of their own or have more of a collective leadership.

His father, the supreme leader, had worked hard “to reduce the unpredictability within the system by grooming President Raisi to potentially be his successor, and now all of those plans are out of the window and they’re back to the drawing board,” Mr. Vaez said. “They have to organize an internal election” for the next supreme leader inside the system “at a time that the regime is facing a severe crisis of legitimacy at home.”

As for the public election for the next president, supposed to take place within 50 days, there are worries about public indifference.

The regime has become increasingly divorced from the population, Mr. Vaez and others said, by cracking down on public dissent, including on women protesting the Islamic dress code and a lack of freedoms.

By disqualifying “any candidate who is even a loyal critic of the system,” elections have become a farce, Mr. Vaez said. “The Islamic Republic has really focused on ideological conformity at the top rather than legitimacy from below.”

Image
Six rescue workers carry a body on a stretcher on a foggy hillside.

A photo provided by the Moj News Agency showing rescue team members carrying the body of a victim of the helicopter crash on Monday in northwest Iran. Credit...Azin Haghighi/Moj News Agency, via Associated Press

That has produced enormous political apathy, with fewer than 10 percent of voters in Tehran turning out for parliamentary runoff elections just 10 days ago. “All the government cares about now is a smooth transition to the next supreme leader,” Mr. Vaez said.

A new administration, Ms. Geranmayeh said, “will inherit a broken economy and an even more broken social contract with a population that has been deeply frustrated with the Islamic Republic.”

Externally, the challenges are steep as well. Iran and Israel attacked each other directly in April, even as Israel is already fighting Iran’s military proxies — Hamas in Gaza and, less vividly, Hezbollah in Lebanon. Iran also sponsors the Houthis in Yemen, who have attacked shipping in the Red Sea.

Iran has worked to avoid a larger war between Hezbollah and Israel, and a direct conflict with Israel is also something the Islamic Republic can ill afford.

It has been holding intermittent talks with the United States on de-escalating the regional conflict and on the future of its nuclear program. The death of Mr. Raisi threatens to complicate those talks, too.

“While there will be no love lost in D.C. for Raisi, instability in Iran would come at a bad time,” said Trita Parsi, an Iran expert at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, making “escalation prevention all the more difficult.”

Image
A missile defense system leaves three streaks of light in the evening sky over an urban area.

A missile defense system operating last month in Ashkelon, Israel, after Iran launched drones and missile strikes. Credit...Amir Cohen/Reuters

Since the collapse of the 2015 Iran nuclear deal in 2018, when Donald J. Trump, then the president, pulled out of the arrangement, Iran has moved to enrich uranium very close to bomb grade, causing tensions, too, with the International Atomic Energy Agency.

Iran has turned openly toward closer alignment with American rivals, especially Russia and China, which once supported the international effort to constrain Iran’s nuclear program but do so no longer.

Both countries have been buying Iran’s oil, despite international sanctions, helping to keep the Iranian economy barely afloat. Iran has been a crucial supporter of Russia’s war against Ukraine, selling it drones of all kinds as well as ballistic missiles in return for help with missile design, analysts say.

Increasingly, some Iranian officials speak of the program as a nuclear deterrent, even as the government insists that Iran’s program is purely civilian, and Ayatollah Khamenei has denied that Iran is seeking a nuclear weapon.

The Revolutionary Guards Corps is considered increasingly powerful in both nuclear and regional affairs, taking advantage of Ayatollah Khamenei’s weakened health and the regime’s fear of internal instability. The larger question is whether the Revolutionary Guards, already a major economic player domestically, will become more openly powerful politically as well.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/20/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

In Calling Elections in France, Macron Makes a Huge Gamble

The president has challenged voters to test the sincerity of their support for the far right in European elections. Were the French letting off steam, or did they really mean it?


President Emmanuel Macron of France has called early legislative elections, a move that a center-left leader described as “a dangerous game.”Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times

On the face of it, there is little logic in calling an election from a position of great weakness. But that is what President Emmanuel Macron has done by calling a snap parliamentary election in France on the back of a humiliation by the far right.

After the National Rally of Marine Le Pen and her popular protégé Jordan Bardella handed him a crushing defeat on Sunday in elections for the European Parliament, Mr. Macron might have done nothing. He might also have reshuffled his government, or simply altered course through stricter controls on immigration and by renouncing contested plans to tighten rules on unemployment benefits.

Instead, Mr. Macron, who became president at 39 in 2017 by being a risk taker, chose to gamble that France, having voted one way on Sunday, will vote another in a few weeks.

“I am astonished, like almost everyone else,” said Alain Duhamel, the prominent author of “Emmanuel the Bold,” a book about Mr. Macron. “It’s not madness, it’s not despair, but it is a huge risk from an impetuous man who prefers taking the initiative to being subjected to events.”

Shock coursed through France on Monday. The stock market plunged. Anne Hidalgo, the mayor of Paris, a city that will host the Olympic Games in just over six weeks, said she was “stunned” by an “unsettling” decision. “A thunderbolt,” thundered Le Parisien, a daily newspaper, across its front page.

For Le Monde, it was “a jump in the void.” Raphaël Glucksmann, who guided the revived center-left socialists to third place among French parties in the European vote, accused Mr. Macron of “a dangerous game.”

Image
Marine Le Pen and Jordan Bardella raising and linking hands, with young people waving French flags behind them.

Marine Le Pen, longtime leader of the National Rally party, and Jordan Bardella, its lead candidate for the European Parliament elections, in Paris earlier this month.Credit...Thomas Padilla/Associated Press

France is always a mystery, its perennial discontent and restiveness at odds with its prosperity and beauty, but this was a surprise of unusual proportions. Mr. Macron, after a stinging defeat in which the National Rally won 31.37 percent of the vote to 14.6 percent for the coalition led by his Renaissance party, has in effect called his country’s bluff, asking if its apparent readiness for the extreme right in power is real or a mere letting-off of steam.

The risk is that about a month from now Mr. Macron would have to govern with Mr. Bardella, 28, who represents everything he abhors, as his prime minister. If the nationalist, anti-immigrant National Rally wins an absolute majority in the 577-member National Assembly, an unlikely scenario, or merely emerges as by far the strongest party, which is more plausible, Mr. Macron may be obliged to swallow hard and do that.

Ms. Le Pen, with her eye on winning the presidency in 2027, would almost certainly defer to Mr. Bardella, who led the party’s European election campaign, for the post of prime minister.

France would then be confronted with the consecration through high political office of the extreme right, an idea held unthinkable ever since the Vichy government ruled France in collaboration with the Nazis between 1940 and 1944.

Why play with fire in this way? “It’s not the same election, not the same form of ballot, and not the same stakes,” said Jean-Philippe Derosier, a professor of public law at the University of Lille. “Macron apparently feels it’s the least bad choice to have a possible National Rally prime minister under his control, rather than a Le Pen victory in 2027.”

//The Far Right in France

//Jordan Bardella, the New Face of France’s Surging Right https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/08/worl ... latedLinks

//Charismatic and clean cut, shorn of the Le Pen name, the young National Rally leader took his party to its blockbuster showing in European elections on Sunday.
//June 8, 2024

In other words, Mr. Macron, who is term limited and will leave office in 2027, may be flirting with the notion that three years in office for the National Rally — turning it from a party of protest to a party with the onerous responsibilities of government — would stall its inexorable rise.

It is one thing to rail from the margins, quite another to run a heavily indebted and polarized country so angry over the level of immigration, crime and living costs that many French people seem driven by a sentiment that “enough is enough.”

As in other Western societies, including the United States, a widespread feeling of alienation, even invisibility, among people outside the wired cities of the knowledge economy has led to a broad feeling that the prevailing system needs blowing up.

Ms. Le Pen on Sunday announced the end of “the painful globalist parenthesis that has made so many people suffer in the world.” Given that mainstream pro-European parties won about 60 percent of the vote in the European Parliament election, despite the far-right surge, that appeared to be a bold prediction.

A “cohabitation,” as the French call it, between a president from one party and a prime minister from another, is not unknown — most recently, Jacques Chirac, a center-right Gaullist, governed with a Socialist prime minister, Lionel Jospin, between 1997 and 2002. France survived and Mr. Chirac was re-elected.

But never before has there been such an ideological gulf, going to the very conception of French values and the core importance of the European Union for the continent’s liberty, as there would be between Mr. Macron and a National Rally prime minister.

For Mr. Macron, a Europe already severely tested by the war in Ukraine will only count in the 21st century if it unites and pools its military and industrial resources. He considers this struggle existential for the continent, at a time when the Russian threat has grown.

For the National Rally, it is time for nations to reassert themselves against European federalism and against globalization. It wants to control frontiers strictly, resist the “punitive” ecological measures emanating from Brussels that it says drive up prices, and prevent what it sees as the dilution, or even disappearance, of nationhood through immigration.

Mr. Macron, in calling the election, made clear his view that France stands at a historic crossroads.

“To be French is to rise to the challenge of the epoch when necessary,” he said. “It is to know what a vote is worth and how liberty feels. To act, whatever the circumstances, with responsibility is fundamentally to write history rather than be its victim. That moment is now.”

These were ringing words with a distinct echo of Charles de Gaulle, who dissolved Parliament in 1968 after the civil unrest that coursed through the country in May of that year. De Gaulle emerged strengthened as the French people chose order.

But after seven years in power, during which he has practiced a highly centralized and hierarchical form of government, Mr. Macron, who is often criticized as aloof and who has shunned coalition-seeking in Parliament, looks isolated.

Both the center-right Republicans and the center-left Socialists have shown no inclination for now to join with Mr. Macron’s centrist Renaissance, even if such a coalition were to be the only way to keep the far right from power.

The Socialists are instead part of efforts to revive an alliance stretching to the extreme left for the election. Of course, in the breach, they may change their minds but Mr. Macron cannot count on this.

“France is a country of the discontented, but Mr. Macron has provoked an acute form of personal resentment,” Mr. Duhamel said. “He has given many French people the feeling of being inferior, and they detest that.”

Such is the animus that Mr. Macron may have encountered, he might well have been forced to dissolve a Parliament where he does not have an absolute majority in the fall anyway.

Standard & Poor’s, the American rating agency, downgraded France’s debt rating last month and the government is looking for more than $20 billion in budget cuts. Having raised the age of retirement to 64 from 62 last year over fierce protests, Mr. Macron now wants to rein in unemployment benefits. All of this would have provoked fierce resistance in Parliament.

Instead, after a debacle that was more than a defeat, Mr. Macron has seized the reins, forced all parties into a scramble to prepare for the two-round election on June 30 and July 7, dictated the agenda, disoriented everyone and made perhaps the biggest gamble of his political career.

He believes that a certain France is still unprepared to risk handing power to Ms. Le Pen. It was the French author Jean Cocteau who wrote: “Since these mysteries overtake us, let’s pretend to be their organizer.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/10/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

G7 Leaders, Expanding the Circle, Shift Focus to Migration and the South

Leaders from India, Brazil, the Middle East and Africa joined discussions in a nod to the changing global balance of power.


Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy and President Biden at the Group of 7 summit in Savelletri, Italy, on Thursday.Credit...Erin Schaff/The New York Times

The Group of 7 countries threw open the doors of their club on Friday to India, Brazil, Turkey and other non-Western countries, acknowledging a shifting global landscape as they tried to enlist these nations’ leaders in causes ranging from climate change to managing the economic competition with China.

While diplomats from the Group of 7 hammered out a communiqué that pledged support for Ukraine in its war against Russia and greater ambition in curbing carbon emissions, the focus was on Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil and other leaders from outside the G7, whose support is increasingly critical to achieving any of these goals.

Among the thorny questions on the second day of the summit: migration, which has helped fuel a recent resurgence of populism and far-right parties in Europe and the United States. The leaders also discussed the war in Gaza and China’s state subsidies of industries like electric vehicles, which has prompted the United States and the European Union to impose tariffs on Chinese exports.

Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni of Italy, who is hosting the gathering, said the goal of her expanded guest list was to “strengthen dialogue with the nations of the Global South.” She insisted that the Group of 7 was “not a fortress closed in itself” but “an offer of values that we open to the world.”

Ms. Meloni recruited Pope Francis to speak to the leaders about the dangers posed by artificial intelligence. Francis urged them to regulate the technology, of which he was himself a victim when A.I.-generated fake images of him clad in a white puffer jacket and a jewel-encrusted crucifix went viral last year.

“The benefits and the damages it causes will depend on the way it is used,” the pope declared, warning of the risks of A.I.’s uncontrolled development. He called for lethal autonomous weapons, which are unmanned and uncontrolled by a human hand, to be banned, saying, “No machine should ever decide whether to take the life of a human being away.”

The pope’s appearance was the emotional highlight of a day of carefully staged summitry that seemed to concede that the West is less dominant demographically and economically than in the past — and that it is listening to calls for more equity and balance in global decision-making.

As Ms. Meloni guided the pope, in a wheelchair, around a circular table to meet the leaders, he was greeted by a visibly moved Mr. Biden and got an enthusiastic hug from Argentina’s flamboyant president, Javier Milei, whose election last November was viewed as another sign of the rising tide of populism across the Americas and Europe.

This is not the first time non-Western leaders have been invited to a Group of 7 meeting, but rarely have they been so conspicuous. In part that reflects the issues that Ms. Meloni has highlighted: Africa and the Mediterranean. The leaders of Algeria, Kenya and Tunisia were on hand at a luxury resort hotel on Italy’s southern coast, as was President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey.

“Inviting key developing country leaders reflects the reality that confronting China and Russia requires the cooperation of more than the G7,” said Daniel M. Price, who was a top trade adviser to President George W. Bush. “And Brazil, India and Turkey are as concerned about Chinese predatory trade practices and overcapacity as are Japan, Europe and the U.S.”

A draft of the final G7 communiqué voiced concern about what the leaders called China’s “persistent industrial targeting and comprehensive nonmarket policies and practices that are leading to global spillovers, market distortions and harmful overcapacity.”

The draft communiqué endorsed Mr. Biden’s effort to broker a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza. France and Canada had pushed for stronger language on Israel’s conduct of the war, according to people familiar with the negotiations, but the United States and Germany resisted.

In a victory for Ms. Meloni, a conservative who opposes abortion, the draft communiqué did not include an explicit reference to abortion, in a passage that pledged to promote “comprehensive sexual and reproductive health and rights for all.” A communiqué released by the Group of 7 leaders after their last summit in Hiroshima, Japan, referred specifically to abortion rights.

The issue injected a briefly discordant note into the gathering after President Emmanuel Macron of France told an Italian journalist that some politicians did not share France’s “vision of equality between women and men.” Ms. Meloni criticized Mr. Macron, who recently called a snap parliamentary election, as seeking to politicize the issue at a “precious forum like the G7.”

For the most part, however, the meeting underscored harmony among the leaders, many of whom are embattled by their own domestic politics. It also served as a platform for Ms. Meloni, 47, who has overcome initial qualms about her political roots in a party built on the ashes of fascism to win respect for her steadfast support of Ukraine. Presiding over the two days of meetings, she was able to put a spotlight on several of her pet issues.

How to control migration has vexed the United States and Europe, compounded by the effects of climate change and warfare in Afghanistan, the Middle East and Ukraine. It is a particularly delicate issue for Ms. Meloni, who has campaigned hard to fight what she has called “uncontrolled immigration” to Italy and other parts of Europe from Africa and the Middle East.

While Europe has welcomed thousands of Ukrainians, especially women and children, fleeing the Russian invasion, Ukrainian officials have urged European countries to help them repatriate men of fighting age.

“Turkey is a critical player on global migration,” said Peter Westmacott, who served as Britain’s ambassador to Turkey, France and the United States. He noted that there are about three million Syrian refugees in Turkey, as well as hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Kurds and Afghans.

“If Europe wants to control migration from these countries,” Mr. Westmacott said, “Turkey is an indispensable partner.”

Mr. Erdogan, he said, could also yet play a role in brokering an end to Ukraine’s war with Russia. As a Black Sea power, Turkey has kept open its commercial and political links to Russia. But it is also a NATO member and has supplied cheap, highly effective drones to help the Ukrainian resistance.

Some of the invitations reflected diplomatic protocol, according to Italian officials. Brazil, India and South Africa were automatically included as current or future presidents of the Group of 20 industrialized nations.

Argentina was invited, these officials said, because Mr. Milei has recognized the connections and interdependence between East and West. He and Ms. Meloni have also cultivated close personal ties, sharing a right-wing populism that includes opposition to abortion and gay rights.

Emma Bubola contributed reporting from London.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/14/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

How Capitalism Went Off the Rails


Yasu & Junko/Trunk Archive

The Group of 7 countries might have set a record when they met in Italy last week. Has there ever been a less popular assemblage of leaders of the free world? Approval ratings ranged from Giorgia Meloni of Italy’s about 40 percent to Emmanuel Macron of France’s 21 percent to Fumio Kishida of Japan’s 13 percent. Last year the Edelman Trust Barometer found that only 20 percent of people in the G7 countries thought that they and their families would be better off in five years. Another Edelman survey, from 2020, uncovered a broad distrust of capitalism in countries across the world, “driven by a growing sense of inequity and unfairness in the system.”

Why the broad dissatisfaction with an economic system that is supposed to offer unsurpassed prosperity? Ruchir Sharma, the chairman of Rockefeller International and a Financial Times columnist, has an answer that boils down to two words: easy money. In an eye-opening new book, “What Went Wrong With Capitalism,” he makes a convincing case.

“When the price of borrowing money is zero,” Sharma told me this week, “the price of everything else goes bonkers.” To take just one example: In 2010, as the era of ultralow and even negative interest rates was getting started, the median sale price for a house in the United States hovered around $220,000. By the start of this year, it was more than $420,000.

Nowhere has inflation (in the broad sense of the term) been more evident than in global financial markets. In 1980 they were worth a total of $12 trillion — equal to the size of the global economy at the time. After the pandemic, Sharma noted, those markets were worth $390 trillion, or around four times the world’s total gross domestic product.

In theory, easy money should have broad benefits for regular people, from employees with 401(k)s to consumers taking out cheap mortgages. In practice, it has destroyed much of what used to make capitalism an engine of middle-class prosperity in favor of the old and very rich.

First, there was inflation in real and financial assets, followed by inflation in consumer prices, followed by higher financing costs as interest rates have risen to fight inflation — which inevitably begets political pressure to return to easy-money policies.

For wealthier Americans who own assets or had locked in low-interest mortgages, this hasn’t been a bad thing. But for Americans who rely heavily on credit, it’s been devastating. “For families already strained by high prices, dwindling savings and slowing wage growth, increased borrowing costs are pushing them closer to the financial edge,” The Times’s Ben Casselman and Jeanna Smialek reported in May.

Sharma noted more subtle damages. Since investors “can’t make anything on government bonds when those yields are near zero,” he said, “they take bigger risks, buying assets that promise higher returns, from fine art to high-yield debt of zombie firms, which earn too little to make even interest payments and survive by taking on new debt.” A recent Associated Press analysis found 2,000 of those zombies (once thought to be mainly a Japanese phenomenon) in the United States. Collectively, those companies have a total of $1.1 trillion in loans to pay between now and September.

The hit to the overall economy comes in other forms, too: inefficient markets that no longer deploy money carefully to their most productive uses, large corporations swallowing smaller competitors and deploying lobbyists to bend government rules in their favor, the collapse of prudential economic practices. “The most successful investment strategy of the 2010s,” Sharma writes, citing the podcaster Joshua Brown, “would have been to buy the most expensive tech stocks and then buy more as they rose in price and valuation.”

But the worst hit is to capitalism itself: a pervasive and well-founded sense that the system is broken and rigged, particularly against the poor and the young. “A generation ago, it took the typical young family three years to save up to the down payment on a home,” Sharma observes in the book. “By 2019, thanks to no return on savings, it was taking 19 years.”

The social consequence of this is rage; the political consequence is populism.

Sharma is no fan of Bidenomics, which, he told me, took “the 100-year expansion of government and put it in overdrive” with unprecedented stimulus packages and politically directed investments. But unlike other prominent Wall Street investors, he isn’t signing up for the Donald Trump bandwagon, either. The former president loves easy money, tax cuts without spending cuts and record deficits.

“He promised to deconstruct the administrative state but ended up adding new rules at the same pace as his predecessor — 3,000 a year,” Sharma said of Trump. “His exercise of presidential authority to personal ends shattered historic precedents and did more to expand than restrict the scope of government. For all their policy differences, both leading U.S. candidates are committed and fearless statists, not friends of competitive capitalism.”

What happens when both major parties are wedded to two versions of the same failing ideas? And what happens when leading figures of both the progressive left and the populist right seek to compound the problem with even easier credit and more runaway spending?

The answer: We are wandering in fog. And the precipice is closer than we think.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/18/opin ... ation.html

[kmaherali]

Four Takeaways From Iran’s Presidential Election

The results from Friday’s election, which drew record-low turnout for a presidential race, will force a runoff on July 5 between a reformist and an ultraconservative.


Voters in Tehran on Friday. Iranian elections once drew enthusiastic crowds, but more people have stayed home in recent years in protest against the ruling establishment.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

Iranian voters signaled their disenchantment with Iran’s system of clerical rule in the country’s presidential election on Friday, going to the polls in record-low numbers to help two establishment candidates limp to a runoff.

The runoff on July 5 will offer voters a final choice between a reformist former health minister, Dr. Masoud Pezeshkian, and an ultraconservative former nuclear negotiator, Saeed Jalili, neither of whom managed to get more than the 50 percent of votes needed to win the presidency. That postpones for another week the question of who will steer Iran through challenges including a sickly economy, the gulf between rulers and ruled and a nearby war that keeps threatening to drag Iran further in.

But despite belonging to two different camps, neither man is expected to bring major change to Iran, given that they must govern with the ultimate approval of Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Here are the most important takeaways emerging from Friday’s election.

Iranians continue to reject the system.

Only 40 percent of eligible Iranians voted on Friday, according to government figures, a historically low turnout for an Iranian presidential race — even lower than the 41 percent level reported for Iran’s parliamentary elections this year.

Though Iranian elections once drew enthusiastic crowds, more and more people have stayed home in recent years as a form of protest against the ruling establishment, which they blame for wrecking the economy, snuffing out social and political freedoms and isolating Iran from the world.

In the 2013 presidential election, large numbers of urban, middle-class Iranians eager for prosperity and a more open society put their faith in a reformist candidate, Hassan Rouhani. They hoped he would loosen social and political restrictions and strike an agreement that would lift punishing Western sanctions in exchange for restricting their country’s nuclear activities.

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A bearded man in a white turban walks into front of a green marble wall.

Hassan Rouhani in 2014. A reformist elected president in 2013, he sought to loosen social and political restraints and to reach out to Western countries in an effort to lift sanctions.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times

Mr. Rouhani made that deal only for President Donald J. Trump to unilaterally withdraw from it and reimpose sanctions in 2018, sending Iran’s economy — which analysts say has also suffered from Iranian leaders’ mismanagement and corruption — back into a tailspin.

And social freedoms that Iranians carved out under Mr. Rouhani’s presidency as enforcers looked the other way — including a loosened dress code that allowed growing numbers of Iranian women to let their mandatory head scarves fall to their shoulders — evaporated after the 2021 election of Mr. Rouhani’s successor, Ebrahim Raisi, a hard-liner who died in a helicopter crash last month.

Seeing that voting for reformists could not secure lasting change, Iranians turned away from the polls and against the system. Their anger hit a new peak in 2022, when months of countrywide antigovernment protests erupted after a young woman, Mahsa Amini, died after being taken into police custody. With enforcement of the law requiring modest dress on the rise under Mr. Raisi, she had been detained for wearing her head scarf improperly.

What could happen in the runoff?

Voters remain skeptical that any candidate can bring true change, even one who has been as openly critical of the government as Dr. Pezeshkian, the reformist candidate. So, despite many voters’ disillusionment with the current, conservative-dominated government, it is far from a sure thing that they will turn out to back Dr. Pezeshkian during the runoff.

One reason Dr. Pezeshkian made it to the runoff, despite being the only reformist in a crowded field, was that the two other main candidates were both hard-liners who split the conservative vote. Mr. Jalili, the more ideologically rigid of the twos, is not guaranteed to pick up his former conservative rival’s voters, since earlier polls indicated that many of those were not interested in supporting Mr. Jalili.

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A white-haired man with rimless glasses speaks in front of a microphone, pointing one finger as he raises a hand in the air.

Saeed Jalili, the conservative candidate who made the runoff, shares hard-line views with Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

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A smiling man in casual clothes stands amid a crowd of people who appear to be greeting him.

Masoud Pezeshkian, a reformist and the other candidate who made the runoff, has been openly critical of the government.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

Still, that may change after that rival, Mohammad Baqer Ghalibaf, asked his followers on Saturday to vote for Mr. Jalili to ensure a conservative victory.

Overall, the powerful ruling establishment, led by Mr. Khamenei, would seem to prefer that Mr. Jalili win. Mr. Khamenei is personally close to Mr. Jalili and shares his hard-line views, and he recently obliquely criticized Dr. Pezeshkian for hewing too close to the West. The fact that the clerical council that vets presidential candidates allowed five conservatives to run alongside a single reformist signaled that the supreme leader wanted a lieutenant who would embrace a similar agenda.

Does it matter?

In Iran’s system, the supreme leader makes all of the biggest decisions, especially when it comes to momentous issues like nuclear negotiations and foreign policy. But the president can set the tone, as Mr. Rouhani did with his pursuit of a nuclear deal with the West.

Whoever becomes president is likely to have a freer hand in managing matters like social restrictions — not only enforcement of the mandatory head scarf, which has become an continuing flashpoint between Iran’s rulers and its population, but also touchy issues like whether female singers can perform onstage.

He will also have some influence over the country’s economic policy. Inflation has soared in recent years and the value of the Iranian currency has plunged, making life a grinding struggle for Iranians who have seen the value of their paychecks and savings melt away. Fresh fruit, vegetables and meat have all become tough for many to afford.

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Two people stand in front of a vendor with several large platters of fruit for sale on a mostly empty city street.

A fruit vendor on Saturday in Tehran. Rising prices mean fresh produce and meat have become hard for many people to afford.Credit...Arash Khamooshi for The New York Times

But efforts at resuscitating the economy may go only so far when Iran continues to suffer under American and European sanctions, which curb Iran’s all-important oil sales as well as banking transactions.

What will it mean for the Middle East crisis and Iran’s nuclear program?

Outside Iran, all eyes are on where the country’s foreign and nuclear policy will go next.

Iran is a crucial player in the conflict that keeps threatening to spill over from Gaza, where Iran’s longtime nemesis Israel is waging a bloody war to eradicate Hamas, into the wider Middle East. Iran has supported, funded and armed not only Hamas, but also Hezbollah, the Lebanese Shiite militia on Israel’s northern border with which Israel has exchanged repeated and deadly strikes in recent months.

Though that violence has not yet metastasized into war, in part because Iran does not want to be drawn into a wider conflict, Israel recently sharpened its tone, warning that it could turn its focus from Gaza to Lebanon. And Iran and Israel are no longer restricting their hostilities to battles by proxy or secret strikes: The two sides carried out open, if limited, strikes this year on each other’s territory.

It is also unclear what the election of a new president will mean for the West’s yearslong effort to curb Iran’s nuclear program. Six years after Mr. Trump withdrew the United States from the original nuclear deal, Iran is now closer than ever to being able to produce several nuclear weapons. And after decades of insisting that its nuclear program is entirely peaceful, some of Iran’s top leaders are publicly arguing that recent missile exchanges with Israel mean Iran should embrace building a bomb.

Vivian Yee is a Times reporter covering North Africa and the broader Middle East. She is based in Cairo. More about Vivian Yee

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/30/worl ... aways.html

[kmaherali]

Political Unrest Worldwide Is Fueled by High Prices and Huge Debts

Economic turmoil is spreading across the globe, and the response has been protests, attempted coups and elections of far-right politicians.


Protests in Bolivia in June. Residents have lined up for gas because of shortages and a military general led a failed coup attempt.Credit...Juan Karita/Associated Press

Like a globe-spanning tornado that touches down with little predictability, deep economic anxieties are leaving a trail of political turmoil and violence across poor and rich countries alike.

In Kenya, a nation buckling under debt, protests over a proposed tax increase last week resulted in dozens of deaths, abductions of demonstrators and a partly scorched Parliament.

At the same time in Bolivia, where residents have lined up for gas because of shortages, a military general led a failed coup attempt, saying the president, a former economist, must “stop impoverishing our country,” just before an armored truck rammed into the presidential palace.

And in France, after months of road blockades by farmers angry over low wages and rising costs, the far-right party surged in support in the first round of snap parliamentary elections on Sunday, bringing its long-taboo brand of nationalist and anti-immigrant politics to the threshold of power.

The causes, context and conditions underlying these disruptions vary widely from country to country. But a common thread is clear: rising inequality, diminished purchasing power and growing anxiety that the next generation will be worse off than this one.

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Protesters in the street, with debris on the ground. Behind them is smoke.

Protests in Nairobi. Demonstrations over a proposed tax increase have resulted in dozens of deaths in Kenya.Credit...Brian Otieno for The New York Times

The result is that citizens in many countries who face a grim economic outlook have lost faith in the ability of their governments to cope — and are striking back.

The backlash has often targeted liberal democracy and democratic capitalism, with populist movements springing up on both the left and right. “An economic malaise and a political malaise are feeding each other,” said Nouriel Roubini, an economist at New York University.

In recent months, economic fears have set off protests around the world that have sometimes turned violent, including in high-income countries with stable economies like Poland and Belgium, as well as those struggling with out-of-control debt, like Argentina, Pakistan, Tunisia, Angola and Sri Lanka.

On Friday, Sri Lanka’s president, Ranil Wickremesinghe, pointed to Kenya and warned: “If we do not establish economic stability in Sri Lanka, we could face similar unrest.”

Even in the United States, where the economy has proved resilient, economic anxieties are partly behind the potential return of Donald J. Trump, who has frequently adopted authoritarian rhetoric. In a recent poll, the largest share of American voters said the economy was the election’s most important issue.

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People standing around inside a food market waiting to be served.

Shoppers in a market in Buenos Aires in January. Prices in Argentina have nearly quadrupled this year compared with 2023.Credit...Sarah Pabst for The New York Times

National elections in more than 60 countries this year have focused attention on the political process, inviting citizens to express their discontent.

Economic problems always have political consequences. Yet economists and analysts say that a chain of events set off by the Covid-19 pandemic created an acute economic crisis in many parts of the planet, laying the groundwork for the civil unrest that is blooming now.

The pandemic halted commerce, erased incomes and created supply chain chaos that caused shortages of everything from semiconductors to sneakers. Later, as life returned to normal, factories and retailers were unable to match the pent-up demand, boosting prices.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine added another jolt, sending oil, gas, fertilizer and food prices into the stratosphere.

Central banks tried to rein in inflation by increasing interest rates, which in turn squeezed businesses and families even more.

While inflation has eased, the damage has been done. Prices remain high and in some places, the cost of bread, eggs, cooking oil and home heating is two, three or even four times as high as it was a few years ago.

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People walking down a street, some holding umbrellas, as tear gas is dispersed in the air.

The police used water cannons and tear gas to disperse teachers and principals calling for higher salaries during an anti-government demonstration in Colombo, Sri Lanka, last month.Credit...Ishara S. Kodikara/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

As usual, the poorest and most vulnerable countries were slammed the hardest. Governments already strangled by loans they couldn’t afford saw the cost of that debt balloon with the rise in interest rates. In Africa, half of the population lives in nations that spend more on interest payments than they do on health or education.

That has left many countries desperate for solutions. Indermit Gill, chief economist at the World Bank, said nations unable to borrow because of a debt crisis had essentially two ways to pay their bills: printing money or raising taxes. “One leads to inflation,” he said. “The other leads to unrest.”

After paying off a $2 billion bond in June, Kenya sought to raise taxes. Then things boiled over.

Thousands of protesters swarmed the Parliament in Nairobi. At least 39 people were killed and 300 injured in clashes with the police, according to rights groups. The next day, President William Ruto withdrew the proposed bill that included tax increases.

In Sri Lanka, stuck under $37 billion in debt, “the people are just broken,” said Jayati Ghosh, an economist at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, after a recent visit to the capital city, Colombo. Families are skipping meals, parents cannot afford school fees or medical coverage, and a million people have lost access to electricity over the past year because of unaffordable price and tax increases, she said. The police have used tear gas and water cannons to disperse protests.


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A line of tractors parked on a road.

Farmers angry over low wages and rising costs staged a protest earlier this year on a road that connects Spain and France.Credit...David Borrat/EPA, via Shutterstock

In Pakistan, the rising costs of flour and electricity set off a wave of demonstrations that started in Kashmir and spread this week to nearly every major city. Traders closed their shops on Monday, blocking roads and burning electricity bills.

“We cannot bear the burden of these inflated electricity bills and the hike in taxes any longer,” said Ahmad Chauhan, a pharmaceuticals seller in Lahore. “Our businesses are suffering, and we have no choice but to protest.”

Pakistan is deep in debt to a string of international creditors, and it wants to increase tax revenues by 40 percent to try to win a bailout of up to $8 billion from the International Monetary Fund — its lender of last resort — to avoid defaulting.

No country has a bigger I.M.F. loan program than Argentina: $44 billion. Decades of economic mismanagement by a succession of Argentine leaders, including printing money to pay bills, has made inflation a constant struggle. Prices have nearly quadrupled this year compared with 2023. Argentines now use U.S. dollars instead of Argentine pesos for big purchases like houses, stashing stacks of $100 bills in jackets or bras.

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People at a small shoe stand in the streets of Pakistan.

The rising costs of flour and electricity set off a wave of demonstrations that started in Kashmir and spread this week to nearly every major city in Pakistan.Credit...Saiyna Bashir for The New York Times

The economic turmoil led voters in November to elect Javier Milei, a self-described “anarcho-capitalist” who promised to slash government spending, as president. He has cut thousands of jobs, chopped wages and frozen infrastructure projects, imposing austerity measures that exceed even those the I.M.F. has sought in its attempts to help the country fix its finances. In his first six months, poverty rates have soared.

Many Argentines are fighting back. Nationwide strikes have closed businesses and canceled flights, and protests have clogged plazas in Buenos Aires. Last month, at a demonstration outside Argentina’s Congress, some protesters threw rocks or lit cars on fire. The police responded with rubber bullets and tear gas. Several opposition lawmakers were injured in the clashes.

Martin Guzmán, a former economy minister of Argentina, said that when national leaders restructure crushing government debt, the agreements fall most heavily on the people whose pensions are reduced and whose taxes are increased. That is why he pushed for a law in 2022 that required Argentina’s elected Congress to approve any future deals with the I.M.F.

“There is a problem of representation and discontent,” Mr. Guzmán said. “That is a combination that leads to social unrest.”

Even the world’s wealthiest countries are bubbling with frustration. European farmers, worried about their prospects, are angry that the cost of new environmental regulations intended to ward off climate change is threatening their livelihoods.

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Martin Guzmán, wearing a dark jacket and light blue shirt, gestures as he speaks.

Martin Guzmán, a former economy minister of Argentina, said that when national leaders restructure government debt, the agreements fall most heavily on the people whose pensions are reduced and whose taxes are increased.Credit...Nathalia Angarita for The New York Times

Overall, Europeans have felt that their wages are not going as far as they used to. Inflation reached nearly 11 percent at one point in 2022, chipping away at incomes. Roughly a third of people in the European Union believe their standards of living will decline over the next five years, according to a recent survey.

Protests have erupted in Greece, Portugal, Belgium and Germany this year. Outside Berlin in March, farmers spread manure on a highway, causing several crashes. In France, they burned hay, dumped manure in Nice’s City Hall and hung the carcass of a wild boar outside a labor inspection office in Agen.

As the head of France’s farmers union told The New York Times: “It’s the end of the world versus the end of the month.”

The economic anxieties are adding to divisions between rural and urban dwellers, unskilled and college educated workers, religious traditionalists and secularists. In France, Italy, Germany and Sweden, far-right politicians have seized on this dissatisfaction to promote nationalist, anti-immigrant agendas.

And growth is slowing worldwide, making it harder to find solutions.

“Terrible things are happening even in countries where there aren’t protests,” said Ms. Ghosh, the University of Massachusetts Amherst economist, “but protests kind of make everybody wake up.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/05/busi ... ality.html

[kmaherali]

The Deep Source of Trump’s Appeal



David Brooks
By David Brooks

Opinion Columnist

There was an extraordinary story in Politico this week. A group of Democratic officials and union leaders told journalists that Donald Trump was competitive in New York State. In 2020, Joe Biden won New York by 23 points. But now, Democratic Manhattan Borough President Mark Levine said, “I truly believe we’re a battleground state now.”

If New York is anything remotely like a battleground, then Trump is going to win this election in a landslide. What is going on?

The proximate answer of course is that many voters think Biden is too old. But that doesn’t explain why Trump was ahead even before the debate. It doesn’t explain why Trump’s candidacy is still standing after Jan. 6. It doesn’t explain why America is on the verge of turning in an authoritarian direction.

I’ve been trying to think through the deeper roots of our current dysfunction with the help of a new book by James Davison Hunter titled “Democracy and Solidarity: On the Cultural Roots of America’s Political Crisis.” Hunter, a scholar at the University of Virginia, is (in my opinion) the nation’s leading cultural historian.

He reminds us that a nation’s political life rests upon cultural foundations. Each society has its own way of seeing the world, its own basic assumptions about what is right and wrong, its own vision of a better world that gives national life direction and purpose. Culture is the ocean of symbols and stories in which we swim.

American culture, Hunter argues, was formed within the tension between Enlightenment values and religious faith. America was founded at the high point of the Enlightenment, and according to Enlightenment ideas: a belief in individual reason, that social differences should be settled through deliberation and democracy, that a free society depends on neutral institutions like the electoral system or the courts, which will be fair to all involved.

But over the centuries many Americans have also believed that America has a covenantal relationship with God — from Puritan leaders like John Winthrop on down. The Bible gave generations of Americans a bedrock set of moral values, the conviction that we live within an objective moral order, the faith that the arc of history bends toward justice. Religious fervor drove many of our social movements, like abolitionism. Religious fervor explains why America has always had big arguments over things like Prohibition and abortion, which don’t seem to rile other nations as much. As late as 1958, according to a Gallup poll, only 18 percent of Americans said they would be willing to vote for an atheist for president.

Each generation, Hunter continues, works out its own balance in the tension between Enlightenment liberty and moral authority. In the 20th century, for example, the philosopher John Dewey emerged as the great champion of Enlightenment values. He believed that religion had been discredited but that a public ethic could be built by human reason, on the basis of individual dignity and human rights. He had great faith in the power of education to train people to become moral citizens. (Dewey’s understanding of education remains influential in the United States.)

The theologian Reinhold Niebuhr thought this was naïve. He believed that Dewey underestimated the human capacity for sin. He believed that you can’t use science to answer questions about life’s ultimate purpose and meaning. He dismissed the idea that with just a little more schooling, we would be able to educate people out of their racism and selfishness, or that secularism can address life’s deepest problems. “The religious ideal of forgiveness,” Niebuhr wrote, “is more profound and more difficult than the rational virtue of tolerance.”

Dewey and Niebuhr differed, but they both thought it was important to build a coherent moral order; they both believed there was a thing called the truth; they both believed that capitalism preyed on the vulnerable. In other words, across their differences they both operated within the cultural framework and tension that had long defined America.

And over the decades, most Americans lived with one ear attuned to the doctrine of Dewey and the other ear attuned to the doctrine of Niebuhr. If you want to see these two traditions within one person, look at Martin Luther King Jr. He used a Christian metaphysics to show how American democracy could live up to both Enlightenment and divine ideals.

Unfortunately, Hunter notes, this fruitful cultural tension died with King. Starting in the 1960s, America grew less religious. Those who remained religious were told to keep their faith to the private sphere. American public life became largely secular, especially among the highly educated classes, producing what the First Things editor Richard John Neuhaus called “the naked public square.” By 2020, 60 percent of Americans said they would vote for an atheist for president.

At the same time, science and reason failed to produce a substitute moral order that could hold the nation together. By 1981, in the famous first passage of his book “After Virtue,” the philosopher Alasdair Macintyre argued that we had inherited fragments of moral ideas, not a coherent moral system to give form to a communal life, not a solid set of moral foundations to use to settle disputes. Moral reasoning, he wrote, had been reduced to “emotivism.” If it feels right, do it. In 1987, Allan Bloom released his megaselling “The Closing of the American Mind,” arguing that moral relativism had become the dominant ethos of the era.

In other words, Americans lost faith in both sides of the great historical tension, and with it the culture that had long held a diverse nation together. By the 21st century it became clear that Americans were no longer disagreeing with one another; they didn’t even perceive the same reality. You began to hear commencement speakers declare that each person has to live according to his or her own truth. Critics talked about living in a post-truth society. Hunter talks about cultural exhaustion, a loss of faith, a rising nihilism — the belief in nothing. As he puts it, “If there is little or no common political ground today, it is because there are few if any common assumptions about the nature of a good society that underwrite a shared political life.”

Was there anything that would fill this void of meaning? Was there anything that could give people a shared sense of right and wrong, a sense of purpose?

It turns out there was: identity politics. People on the right and the left began to identify themselves within a particular kind of moral story. This is the story in which my political group is the victim of oppression and other groups are the oppressors. For people who feel they are floating in a moral and social vacuum, this story provides a moral landscape — there are those bad guys over there and us good guys over here. The story provides a sense of belonging. It provides social recognition. By expressing my rage, I will earn your attention and respect.

In public discourse, identity politics is more associated with the left. Progressivism used to be oriented around how to make capitalism just; but now in its upper-middle-class form, it’s oriented around proper esteem for and inclusion of different identity groups.

But as Hunter notes, Donald Trump practices identity politics just as much as any progressive. He tells the story of how small-town, less-educated Christians are being oppressed by elites. He alone is their retribution. That story resonates with a lot of people. In the 1950s, Billy Graham assumed that his faith was central to American life. By the 2020s his son Franklin considered himself a warrior under siege in an anti-Christian culture.

The problem with this form of all-explaining identity politics is that it undermines democracy. If others are evil and out to get us, then persuasion is for suckers. If our beliefs are defined by our identities and not individual reason and personal experience, then different Americans are living in different universes and there is no point in trying to engage in deliberative democracy. You just have to crush them. You have to grab power and control of the institutions and shove your answers down everybody else’s throats.

In this climate, Hunter argues, “the authoritarian impulse becomes impossible to restrain.” Authoritarianism imposes a social vision by force. If you can’t have social solidarity organically from the ground up, then you can impose it from top down using the power of the state. This is the menace of Trumpism. If you read my recent interview with Steve Bannon, you’ll see that he talks like a character straight out of Hunter’s book.

Democrats are not immune to this way of thinking. In a 2019 survey Democrats were more likely than Republicans to admit to occasionally thinking that we’d be better off as a country “if large numbers of the opposing party in the public today just died.” Democrats were more likely than Republicans to believe that their opponents were “evil” and “un-American.”

But in this world, in which politics is seen as a form of total war, Biden looks obsolete. In a nihilistic pseudo-authoritarian world, he’s still one of those old-fashioned liberals who reveres the Constitution and his Catholicism. The ideals that animate him and that he uses to give poetry and lift to his speeches fail to inspire millions of American voters. A plurality of voters believe that Biden’s age is a bigger problem than Trump’s authoritarianism because they just don’t see the latter as that big a problem.

The core question in Hunter’s book is: Can you have an Enlightenment political system atop a post-Enlightenment culture? I’d say the answer to that question is: Over the long term, no.

The task, then, is to build a new cultural consensus that is democratic but also morally coherent. My guess, and it is only a guess, is that this work of cultural repair will be done by religious progressives, by a new generation of leaders who will build a modern social gospel around love of neighbor and hospitality for the marginalized.

But the work of building that culture will take decades. Until then, we, as a democracy, are on thin ice.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/11/opin ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Donald Trump, Man of Destiny



Every act of political violence yields instant reactions that can’t be supported by the available facts.

A single assassination attempt by a loner with a rifle doesn’t necessarily tell us anything about whether America is poised to plunge into a political abyss. Nor do the motives of would-be assassins necessarily map onto a given era’s partisan divisions. Nor can we say definitively that this assassination attempt has sealed up the 2024 election for Donald Trump and his running mate, J.D. Vance — surely the wild twists and turns of the Trump era should disabuse us of that kind of confidence.

Having lived through eight years of that era, though, I feel comfortable making one sweeping statement about the moments when Trump shifted his head fractionally and literally dodged a bullet, fell bleeding and then rose with his fist raised in an iconic image of defiance. The scene on Saturday night in Pennsylvania was the ultimate confirmation of his status as a man of destiny, a character out of Hegel or Thomas Carlyle or some other verbose 19th-century philosopher of history, a figure touched by the gods of fortune in a way that transcends the normal rules of politics.

In Hegel’s work, the great man of history is understood as a figure “whose own particular aims involve those large issues which are the will of the World Spirit.” Hegel’s paradigm was Napoleon, the Corsican adventurer whose quest for personal power and military glory spread the ideas of the French Revolution, shattered the old regimes of Europe and ushered in the modern age.

For Hegel the great man’s role is a fundamentally progressive one. He is developing or revealing some heretofore hidden truth, pushing civilization toward its next stage of development, sometimes committing crimes or trampling sacred things but always in service to a higher aim, the unfolding intentions of a divine process.

In different ways in my own lifetime, American conservatism and liberalism placed Hegelian hopes in Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama, both figures who seemed to embody a grand optimistic vision of how the global future would unfold.

But what if progress isn’t linear, and the World Spirit’s purposes are a bit more complicated than an optimistic form of liberal Protestantism expects? What if an era is decadent rather than vital? What if there is no obvious next political stage for a civilization’s development? What if stagnation and repetition rule the day? What does a man of destiny look like then?

I think we have to say it looks like Donald Trump: a man of notable charisma, limited ideological conviction and naked appetite, motivated as much by wounded vanity as by Napoleonic ambition, who has become the avatar of the rebellious populism that has remade his era’s politics and overthrown or undermined its establishments.

And not just an avatar but a perfect one, more perfect than all the other leading populists — because from Viktor Orban to Javier Milei to his own newly chosen running mate, they tend to have specific ideologies and relatively worked-out worldviews, whereas actual populist sentiment is more protean, more flexible and opportunistic, more certain of its enemies than its policy commitments. More Trumpian, in other words: He’s the archetype of a global phenomenon precisely because he offers something less coherent and predictable, more inchoate and vibes-based, than other figures in the right-wing International.

But that archetypal status extends beyond the substance of the populist age. Trump is a “chaos candidate,” as the extremely non-Hegelian Jeb Bush once said, for whom chaos is a ladder and conventional political opposition a relatively easy obstacle to overcome. He is a man of negligible intellectual curiosity who dominates all of his epoch’s popular media forms: gossip columns, cable news, reality television, social media. He’s a man who represents the shadow side of the American character — not the Lincolnian statesman but the hustler, the mountebank, the self-promoter, the tabloid celebrity — at a time when American power and American corruption are intermingled. And he’s a man graced, this past weekend especially but always, with incredible, preternatural good luck.

That last quality is understood by some of Trump’s religious supporters as proof of divine favor and a reason to support him absolutely. But this is a presumptuous interpretation. (Some notably sinister historical figures have enjoyed miraculous-seeming escapes from assassination.) The man of destiny might represent a test for his society, a form of chastisement, an exposure of weakness and decay — in which case your obligation is not to support him without question, but to try to recognize the historical role he’s playing and match your response to what’s being unsettled or unveiled.

But that recognition is essential. Why talk about Trump in these sweeping terms, the anti-Trump reader might say, bringing in God and history and building him up to be something more than just a charlatan and demagogue? Because otherwise you’re just not dealing in reality. The man has survived self-disgrace and countless political near-death experiences, he’s poised for the greatest comeback in American political history, he just turned an attempted assassination into a Renaissance painting of bloodied defiance … you either see him as the defining figure of the age or you don’t see him at all.

I’m as guilty of this as anyone, not for underestimating Trump at the start (almost everyone did that) but for constantly trying to look beyond him, imagining a world where his political appeal somehow diminished organically and politics regained a more normal-seeming shape — in a Joe Biden versus Ron DeSantis presidential tilt, let’s say. Even my essay on his potential second term, appearing the morning of the assassination attempt, ended with a wistful vision of Trump the lame duck, fading from the spotlight through his second term.

I don’t think that’s how this goes. Trump can be defeated; Hegel’s man Napoleon was defeated, after all, and Hegel assumed that world-historical figures were destined to “fall off like empty hulls from the kernel” when their purpose had been served.

But to beat him — memo to the Biden Democrats — you have to do more, go further, risk much, become something you yourself did not expect. Because in a struggle with a man of destiny, there is no normalcy to be restored.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/15/opin ... stiny.html

[kmaherali]

After Biden’s Withdrawal, Other Aged Leaders Get Some Serious Side-Eye

Most of the world’s oldest leaders — in their 80s and even one in his 90s — are in Africa, which happens to have the youngest population of any continent.


President Paul Biya of Cameroon with his wife, Chantal Biya, in Yaoundé, the capital, in May. At 91, Mr. Biya is the world’s oldest leader.Credit...Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

When President Biden abandoned his re-election campaign this month, citing the need to “pass the torch to a new generation,” some of the most envious accolades he received came from 6,000 miles away.

In central Africa, in coastal Cameroon, many are longing for their president, Paul Biya — at 91 the world’s oldest leader — to take a leaf out of President Biden’s book. But most think he never will.

“He’ll do everything to remain in power,” said Lukong Usheno Kiven, a human rights advocate based in Yaoundé, the capital of Cameroon, where Mr. Biya has been in power for 42 years.

Mr. Biya is just one of dozens of notably aged leaders who are also far older than the populations they serve.

Presidents Xi Jinping of China and Vladimir V. Putin of Russia are both 71. India’s prime minister, Narendra Modi, is 73. Israel’s leader, Benjamin Netanyahu, is 74, while Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, is 88.

But it is in Africa — the world’s youngest continent — where the gerontocracies are most stark. Eleven of the world’s 20 oldest leaders are African, according to research done by the Pew Research Center.

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A man walking toward the camera as two men shake hands behind him as part of a group of people.

Mr. Biya in 1983, a year after he became president of Cameroon. Behind him, President François Mitterrand of France shakes hands with the French tennis player Yannick Noah.Credit...Pierre Guillaud/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

The presidents of Ivory Coast and Equatorial Guinea, Alassane Ouattara and Teodoro Obiang Nguema Mbasogo, are both 82. Namibia’s 82-year-old interim president, Nangolo Mbumba, took office in February after the sitting president who was also age 82, died. Zimbabwe’s president, Emmerson Mnangagwa, is 81.

None of those countries has a median age higher than 22.

And many of those young people want their leaders to follow President Biden’s lead and head toward the exit.

Mr. Biden displayed “principled political leadership,” by stepping out of the race, said Rashweat Mukundu, a Zimbabwe-based adviser for International Media Support, which supports the rights of journalists.

“We don’t see that level of political maturity in Africa,” he added.

Countries that are less free tend to have older leaders, the Pew research showed. President Biden is the world’s 10th oldest leader. Of the other nine, only one leads a country classified as “free” by the think tank Freedom House. That is Mr. Mbumba, the Namibian president.

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A man wearing a dark suit and tie waving.

Namibia’s 82-year-old interim president, Nangolo Mbumba, took office in February after the then sitting president, Hage Geingob, died — also aged 82.Credit...Pool photo by Phill Magakoe

Some Namibians have long been pushing for younger leaders, said Rakkel Andreas, a political analyst in Windhoek, the southern African country’s capital — and Mr. Biden’s withdrawal has intensified chatter about aging leaders. Opponents of Vice President Netumbo Nandi-Ndaitwah, who is now the front-runner in Namibia’s election in November, have honed in on her 71 years.

But many Namibians have felt reassured about their own nation after seeing Mr. Biden’s age-related struggles, Ms. Andreas said.

“For the longest time, African leaders have been dubbed as these old people, not competent,” she said. “The whole world is seeing how the leader of the most powerful nation is clearly needing to retire.”

Presidents have handled the effects of their advancing years in different ways. When Zimbabwe’s late president Robert Mugabe appeared to be taking naps during meetings, aides claimed the nonagenarian was merely “resting his eyes.” Nigeria’s former president Muhammadu Buhari, who left office last year at age 80, disappeared for long stretches of his presidency to receive medical treatment abroad, and once complained that working for six hours per day was “no joke.”

By contrast, Yoweri Museveni, Uganda’s 79-year-old president, made headlines when he shared his indoor workout routine during the pandemic.

“I’m going to start by warming up,” he said, before jogging barefoot laps of his red-carpeted office and doing push-ups as cameras flashed.

One commenter wrote, “Let’s see Biden do 3! My president is still solid as a rock.”

Some Africans justify the advanced age of their leaders. There is a “high reverence for elders as patriarchs,” said Elvis Ngolle Ngolle, a senior member of Mr. Biya’s political party, in Cameroon.

“Political cultures are different,” he said.

Africa has lately acquired a handful of much younger presidents. But most of them have taken power by force: like the 41-year-old leader of Mali, the 44-year-old leader of Guinea, or Burkina Faso’s Ibrahim Traoré, who is, at 36, the world’s youngest president. In Chad, the 40-year-old president, Mahamat Déby, who is the son of its longtime leader who died on the battlefield, won a disputed election in May.

Senegal’s Bassirou Diomaye Faye, age 44, is different. He won an election in the West African country, going from a prison cell to the presidency. His victory was hailed across the continent by youth yearning for a new generation of leaders.

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A man walks toward a reporter with a microphone as another man guides him from behind.

Senegal’s president, Bassirou Diomaye Faye, in Abuja, Nigeria, earlier this year. He was 44 when he was elected.Credit...Kola Sulaimon/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

President Biden’s withdrawal gave African youth more hope — though hope for change is thin on the ground in Cameroon, where Mr. Biya’s government brooks no dissent, and frequently cracks down on any opposition, according to rights groups. President Biya spends long stretches abroad, including in a luxury hotel in Geneva — but few expect anyone but him to win next year’s election.

“Despite Biden’s Withdrawal … Cameroon is Cameroon,” read one recent newspaper headline in the central African country.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/30/worl ... aders.html

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U.S. Recognizes Maduro’s Rival as Winner of Venezuelan Election

Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken said there was “overwhelming evidence” that Edmundo González had won, despite President Nicolás Maduro’s claim of victory.


Edmundo González, the opposition presidential candidate, wearing a blue shirt, stood next to María Corina Machado, a popular opposition leader, at a rally in Caracas, Venezuela, on Tuesday.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times

The United States on Thursday night recognized Venezuela’s opposition presidential candidate, Edmundo González, as the winner of the country’s disputed election.

The announcement, by Secretary of State Antony J. Blinken, comes despite a claim by the country’s authoritarian president, Nicolás Maduro, and by the government-controlled electoral body, that Mr. Maduro had won the Sunday election.

Mr. Maduro has yet to produce clear evidence of a victory, and election officials have failed to provide a vote count. Mr. González’s campaign says it has receipts from more than 80 percent of voting machines that indicate he won by an insurmountable margin.

While some leaders have voiced support for Mr. González in recent days, the United States is the largest nation to recognize him as the winner.

The decision is sure to anger Mr. Maduro, who has long characterized Washington as meddling imperialists. But it’s unclear if the announcement will have any effect on Mr. Maduro’s grip on power.

Mr. Blinken, in a statement, said that “given the overwhelming evidence, it is clear to the United States and, most importantly, to the Venezuelan people that Edmundo González Urrutia won the most votes.”

“We congratulate Edmundo González Urrutia on his successful campaign,” Mr. Blinken continued. “Now is the time for the Venezuelan parties to begin discussions on a respectful, peaceful transition in accordance with Venezuelan electoral law.”

Mr. Maduro did not immediately respond to the statement. But just as it was issued, he wrote on X, the social media platform, that he was willing to talk to the United States “if the U.S. government is willing to respect sovereignty and stop threatening Venezuela.”

//How a New York Times data analysis of partial election results casts further doubt on claims of a Maduro victory. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/31/worl ... pe=Article

The candidacy of Mr. González, who is backed by a popular opposition leader, María Corina Machado, posed the most significant electoral threat to Mr. Maduro since he took office in 2013.

The movement that Mr. Maduro leads, known as Chavismo, has controlled Venezuela for a quarter-century, since his predecessor, President Hugo Chávez, was elected, eventually promising a socialist revolution. Under their leadership, the government has become authoritarian, arresting dissidents, crushing protests through force and crafting elections in favor of the ruling party.

Since the election, angry supporters of Mr. González and Ms. Machado have taken to the streets to protest, leading to a crackdown by security forces and armed pro-government gangs. At least 17 people have died, according to a human rights group, Foro Penal, and reporting by The New York Times. About 750 people have been arrested, according to the country’s attorney general.

Ms. Machado has called supporters to march on Saturday in Caracas, the capital, and to hang the flag of Venezuela as a “symbol of freedom.”

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People drag dismantled signs down a city street, while a small fire burns in the foreground.

Antigovernment protesters in Caracas on Monday, after Nicolás Maduro claimed victory in the presidential election.Credit...Alejandro Cegarra for The New York Times

While the United States is not alone in doubting the election results, other nations have taken a softer approach to Mr. Maduro, clearly believing that they can use diplomacy to cajole him into releasing vote tallies from all the polling stations, as has been done in past elections, and recognizing the real result.

On Thursday, the governments of Mexico, Brazil and Colombia — all governed by leftists who have maintained relatively friendly ties with Mr. Maduro — issued a “call to the electoral authorities of Venezuela to move forward expeditiously and publicly release the data broken down by voting station.”

“We reiterate our willingness to support the efforts of dialogue and search for agreements that benefit the Venezuelan people,” the three governments said in a joint statement.

Early Monday, hours after polls closed, the government-controlled election authority said that Mr. Maduro had received 51 percent of the vote, and Mr. González 44 percent.

The opposition campaign, however, said it had collected receipts printed by each polling machine at the end of the day, and that it had gathered receipts from 81 percent of the machines. Their count indicates that Mr. González won 67 percent of the vote.

Steve Levitsky, an expert on democracy at Harvard University, has called Mr. Maduro’s assertion of victory “one of the most egregious electoral frauds in modern Latin American history.”

Mr. Blinken’s declaration that Mr. González won is likely to be welcomed by those who wanted Washington to take a strong stance. But in light of recent history, there is sure to be skepticism that the statement will have much effect.

In 2019, the Trump administration backed a claim by Juan Guaidó, then the head of Venezuela’s legislature, that he was the rightful president. Mr. Guaidó had invoked an article of the Constitution that allows the president of the National Assembly to take over the executive position in certain situations.

The move was supported by dozens of other countries, and for a brief moment it looked like Mr. Maduro might be forced out. But popular and political momentum behind Mr. Guaidó fizzled, and Mr. Guaidó fled to the United States last year. Today, Mr. Maduro points to the episode as evidence of his strength, and of American weakness.

This week, Mr. Maduro turned to the Supreme Court, which is controlled by his allies, to mediate the election dispute. The court has called for Mr. Maduro and Mr. González to appear before it on Friday.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/01/worl ... 778d3e6de3

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Live Updates: Bangladesh’s Leader Resigns and Flees Country After Protests

The country’s army chief said an interim government would be formed, as demonstrators successfully challenged Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina’s harsh rule.

Video : https://vp.nyt.com/video/2024/08/05/121 ... g_480p.mp4

Here are the latest developments.

Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh has resigned, and the army will oversee the formation of an interim government, the country’s army chief said in a statement to the nation.

Ms. Hasina, 76, had ruled Bangladesh since 2009. She was forced out by weeks of protests that began peacefully and then transformed into deadly clashes with security forces. The army chief, Gen. Waker-uz-Zaman, said he had consulted the country’s political parties and civil society before making his announcement.

The student-led protests grew into a broader movement seeking the removal of Ms. Hasina, who was seen as an increasingly authoritarian leader. On Sunday, the deadliest day of the protests, almost 100 people were reported killed in clashes between security forces and demonstrators across Bangladesh.

Ms. Hasina, one of the world’s longest-ruling female leaders, had blamed the violence on her political opponents and called for “resisting anarchists with iron hands.”

Here’s what you need to know:

Ms. Hasina played a pivotal role in the politics of Bangladesh, a nation of around 170 million people that proclaimed its independence in 1971. She won re-election to a fourth consecutive term in January. She is the daughter of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman, the country’s charismatic founding leader, who was killed in 1975 in a military coup when Ms. Hasina was 28. She served as prime minister from 1996 to 2001 and regained power in 2009.

Under her leadership, the economy, boosted by investment in the garment export industry, saw rapid growth, and average income levels at one point surpassed those in neighboring India. Bangladesh also saw rapid development in education, health, female participation in the labor force and preparedness against climate disasters including flooding — a national priority in a delta nation.

But her critics said that she tried to turn the country into a one-party state, and the protests that began last month reflected broader discontent against her rule.

https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/08/05 ... velopments

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Nobel Laureate Tapped to Lead Interim Government in Bangladesh

The new government was being formed a day after Bangladesh’s longtime leader, facing fierce protests, fled the country.


Muhammad Yunus in Dhaka, Bangladesh, in January.Credit...Mahmud Hossain Opu/Associated Press

The president of Bangladesh on Tuesday appointed Muhammad Yunus, a pioneer in microfinance and a Nobel laureate, to oversee an interim government, accommodating demands by protesters and offering a reprieve for a country scarred by violence.

The plans for a new government were announced a day after Bangladesh’s authoritarian leader, Sheikh Hasina, resigned and fled the country amid a popular uprising.

Word of the Yunus appointment came from the main coordinator of the protests, Nahid Islam, who was among a group of people who met with President Mohammed Shahabuddin on Tuesday. Military officials also attended the meeting, though Mr. Yunus did not.

With the Bangladeshi Parliament dissolved, Mr. Yunus, 84, is expected to lead a temporary government for an uncertain period of time.

“We are forming a government in an extraordinary situation,” said Asif Nazrul, a law professor at the University of Dhaka who was also present at the meeting with the president. “The tenure of the government is yet to be finalized,” Mr. Nazrul said.

The other members of the interim government will be announced within the next few days, meeting attendees said.

Mr. Yunus, who is widely admired in Bangladesh and once made a brief foray into politics, has two immediate tasks.

First, he will have to restore order to a country of 170 million people that has been roiled by weeks of student protests and violent clashes with security forces that have killed around 300 people.

And second, he will have to define the role of the interim government and what its mandate will be until Bangladesh holds elections to choose a new leader.

For days before Ms. Hasina stepped down, protesters had been demanding her resignation, angered after her government began a brutal crackdown on students who had agitated against a preferential quota system being used for public-sector jobs.

Restoring peace and addressing the incidents of violence and vandalism will be top priorities for the interim government, said Fahmida Khatun, head of research at the Centre for Policy Dialogue, a think tank.

“As you can see, there is no order on the streets, a lack of trust in police and there has been significant property damage,” Ms. Khatun said.

Some analysts think Bangladesh may have a chance now to reset.

“It’s an opportune moment for any new interim government in Bangladesh to show solidarity with its people, protect the most vulnerable and not repeat the mistakes of the past,” said Smriti Singh, regional director for South Asia at Amnesty International.

Mr. Yunus will likely have to move quickly to appoint people to stabilize the various government ministries so that the Bangladesh economy doesn’t falter.

Mr. Yunus pioneered the concept of microfinance — lending to people too poor to get bank loans to help them find economic opportunities — and received the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his work, along with Grameen Bank, the institution he founded in 1983.

In 2007, when Bangladesh was under a military-backed interim government, Mr. Yunus began a political party, offering an alternative to a corruption-riddled political establishment. That party didn’t last long, and Mr. Yunus abandoned the idea.

By then, however, he had offended some powerful figures, including Ms. Hasina, analysts said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/06/worl ... 778d3e6de3

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Mexico’s Judges Vote to Strike, Opposing Overhaul of Legal System

President Andrés Manuel López Obrador wants judges elected, not appointed. Court workers have already walked out to protest his plan, which critics call a power grab.


Striking judiciary workers in front of the Federal Judicial Branch building in Mexico City on Monday.Credit...Yuri Cortez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Federal judges voted on Monday night to go on strike across Mexico, protesting President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s proposed overhaul of the country’s judicial system. The judges will join thousands of other court employees who went on indefinite strike earlier in the day over the contentious policy changes.

The moves reflect rising tensions over Mr. López Obrador’s push for the most sweeping changes to Mexico’s legal system in decades. He and his supporters want thousands of Mexico’s judges, including those on the Supreme Court, to stand for election instead of being appointed based on qualifications and specialized training.

Mr. López Obrador has defended the plan, arguing that the ultimate goal is to rid the judiciary of “corruption and privileges.” Critics say the change could result in people with minimal legal experience being elected to judgeships.

The president “has lost it,” said Juana Fuentes, the national director of Mexico’s association of federal judges and magistrates, which organized the strike vote. “If this bill passes, we will be creating a regime of absolute power concentrated in one single person.”

The vote means that on Wednesday, more than 1,400 judges and magistrates will join the federal court workers who walked off the job on Monday.

Mr. López Obrador is hoping to push his measures through in September, his last month in office, when Congress reconvenes. With the combination of lawmakers from his Morena party plus allied lawmakers, the president is expected to have a large congressional majority.

But while he appears to have the votes needed in Congress to pass the policy changes, large pockets of resistance have coalesced in recent weeks.

Critics of Mr. López Obrador argue that the proposals amount to a power grab, aimed at eroding checks on the executive branch, after the Supreme Court developed into a bastion of opposition to the president. If the system is changed, all 11 judges on the Supreme Court, as well as thousands of other federal and state judges, could potentially be forced to step down.

“We have been working for 10, 15, 20 years to become judges or magistrates, and suddenly they tell us that those years we invested are no longer going to be of any use,” said Víctor Flores, the secretary general of the Federal Judiciary Workers Union in Toluca, a city in central Mexico. The election of judges by popular vote, he added, would no longer ensure that people who have built their careers in the judiciary could become judges.

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A Mexican flag flies from a flagpole in the interior courtyard, of a Modernist building. The courtyard is devoid of any people.

The empty courtyard of a federal court building on Monday in Mexico City.Credit...Fernando Llano/Associated Press

Court workers, including clerks and other support staff, decided to organize their nationwide strike after learning that Mr. López Obrador’s proposals would not undergo significant changes before being discussed next month in Congress. Last year, hundreds of judicial employees carried out a 13-day strike against proposed budget cuts, included in the government’s initiative, that would negatively affect employee benefits.

Nearly all 55,000 federal court workers are expected to join the strike in the next few days, said Mr. Flores, meaning that hundreds of courthouses and tribunals across the country would be closed. In Mexico State, where Mr. Flores is based, about 1,500 people have already joined the strike, with some locking entrances to their workplaces with chains.

“If the workers don’t show up for work, well, obviously judges and magistrates can’t issue rulings,” Mr. Flores added. However, exceptions would be made to allow rulings on “urgent matters,” including cases where people’s lives are at risk, Ms. Fuentes said.

The striking judges and court workers are hoping to draw attention to the proposed overhaul, which critics say would roll back decades of efforts to bolster judicial independence in Mexico.

“There is an atmosphere of uncertainty, sadness and disappointment,” said Anallely Reyes, a federal clerk who joined the strike in Naucalpan, an industrial hub in Mexico State. “The whole country is going to be harmed by electing people who do not know about these issues. It has taken us years to know the laws, to know how they should be applied.”

Many judicial experts acknowledge that Mexico’s legal system has problems, like slow-moving cases and inept investigations that allow many crimes to go unpunished. But critics contend that Mr. López Obrador’s overhaul would do little to address such systemic issues, or could even make them worse by politicizing vast parts of the judicial system.

“Above all, this is about vengeance,” said Víctor Oléa, the president of Mexico’s national bar association, referring to Mr. López Obrador’s frequent attacks on the judiciary. “It’s a way of going back in time by taking political control over the judicial system.”

Critics say that if the overhaul is approved in its current form, candidates aligned with Mr. López Obrador and his protégé, Claudia Sheinbaum — who was elected president in a June landslide and takes office in October — are likelier to win judicial elections than critics of the government would be.

“What we want is for there to be a true justice system in the country," Ms. Sheinbaum told reporters on Monday when asked about the strike. “Now, the judiciary will have more autonomy when judges, magistrates and ministers are elected. Why? Because a judge will be elected by the people — just like the president.”

Experts in Mexico and abroad, however, have warned that the proposed changes would threaten judicial independence, violate international legal standards and undermine the rule of law.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/19/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

What This Israel-Hezbollah-Hamas-Iran Conflict Is Really About



To understand why and how Israel’s devastating blow to Hezbollah is such a world-shaking threat to Iran, Russia, North Korea and even China, you have to put it in the context of the wider struggle that has replaced the Cold War as the framework of international relations today.

After the Hamas invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, I argued that we were no longer in the Cold War, or the post-Cold War. We were in the post-post-Cold War: a struggle between an ad hoc “coalition of inclusion” — decent countries, not all of them democracies, who see their future as best delivered by a U.S.-led alliance nudging the world to greater economic integration, openness and collaboration to meet global challenges, like climate change — versus a “coalition of resistance,” led by Russia, Iran and North Korea: brutal, authoritarian regimes who use their opposition to the U.S.-led world of inclusion to justify militarizing their societies and maintaining an iron grip on power.

China has been straddling the two camps because its economy depends on access to the coalition of inclusion while the government’s leadership shares a lot of the authoritarian instincts and interests of the coalition of resistance.

You have to see the wars in Ukraine, Gaza and Lebanon in the context of this global struggle. Ukraine was trying to join the world of inclusion in Europe — seeking freedom from Russia’s orbit and to join the European Union — and Israel and Saudi Arabia were trying to expand the world of inclusion in the Middle East by normalizing relations.

Russia attempted to stop Ukraine from joining the West (the European Union and NATO) and Iran, Hamas and Hezbollah attempted to stop Israel from joining the East (ties with Saudi Arabia). Because if Ukraine joined the European Union, the inclusive vision of a Europe “whole and free” would be almost complete and Vladimir Putin’s kleptocracy in Russia almost completely isolated.

And if Israel were allowed to normalize relations with Saudi Arabia, not only would that vastly expand the coalition of inclusion in that region — a coalition already expanded by the Abraham Accords that created ties between Israel and other Arab nations — it would almost totally isolate Iran and its reckless proxies of Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen and the pro-Iranian Shiite militias in Iraq, all of which were driving their countries into failed states.

Indeed, it is hard to exaggerate how much Hezbollah and its leader, Hassan Nasrallah, who was killed by an Israeli strike on Friday, were detested in Lebanon and many parts of the Sunni and Christian Arab world for the way they had kidnapped Lebanon and turned it into a base for Iranian imperialism.

I was speaking over the weekend to Orit Perlov, who tracks Arab social media for Israel’s Institute for National Security Studies. She described the flood of social media postings from across Lebanon and the Arab world celebrating Hezbollah’s demise and urging the Lebanese government to declare a unilateral cease-fire so the Lebanese Army could seize control of Southern Lebanon from Hezbollah and bring quiet to the border. The Lebanese don’t want Beirut to be destroyed like Gaza and they are truly afraid of a return of civil war, Perlov explained to me. Nasrallah had already dragged the Lebanese into a war with Israel they never wanted, but Iran ordered.

This comes on top of the deep anger for the way Hezbollah joined with the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad to crush the democratic uprising there. It is literally like the Wicked Witch from the Wizard of Oz is dead and now everyone is thanking Dorothy (i.e., Israel).

But there is a lot of diplomatic work to be done to translate the end of Nasrallah to a sustainably better future for the Lebanese, Israelis and Palestinians.

The Biden-Harris administration has been building a network of alliances to give strategic weight to the ad hoc coalition of inclusion — from Japan, Korea, the Philippines and Australia in the Far East, through India and across to Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan and then up through the European Union and NATO. The keystone of the whole project was the Biden team’s proposed normalization of relations between Israel and Saudi Arabia, which the Saudis are ready to do, provided Israel agrees to open negotiations with the Palestinian Authority in the West Bank on a two-state solution.

And here comes the rub.

Pay very close attention to the speech by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel before the U.N. General Assembly on Friday. He understands very well the struggle between the coalitions of “resistance” and “inclusion” that I am talking about. In fact, it was central to his U.N. speech.

How so? Bibi held up two maps during his address, one was titled “The Blessing” and the other “The Curse.” “The Curse” showed Syria, Iraq and Iran in black as a blocking coalition between the Middle East and Europe. The second map, “The Blessing,” showed the Middle East with Israel, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Sudan in green and a red two-way arrow going across them, as a bridge connecting the world of inclusion in Asia with the world of inclusion in Europe.

Image

Credit...Richard Drew/Associated Press

But if you looked closely at Bibi’s “Curse” map, it showed Israel — but no borders with Gaza and the Israeli-occupied West Bank (as if it had already been annexed — the goal of this Israeli government).

And that is the rub. The story Bibi wants to tell the world is that Iran and its proxies are the main obstacle to the world of inclusion stretching from Europe, through the Middle East over to the Asia-Pacific region.

I beg to differ. The keystone to this whole alliance is a Saudi-Israel normalization based on reconciliation between Israel and moderate Palestinians.

If Israel now moved ahead and opened a dialogue on two states for two peoples with a reformed Palestinian Authority, which has already accepted the Oslo peace treaty, it would be the diplomatic knockout blow that would accompany and solidify the military knockout blow Israel just delivered to Hezbollah and Hamas.

It would totally isolate the forces of “resistance” in the region and take away their phony shield — that they are the defenders of the Palestinian cause. Nothing would rattle Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah and Russia — even China — more.

But to do that Netanyahu would have to take a political risk even greater than the military risk he just took in killing the leadership of Hezbollah, a.k.a. “The Party of God.”

Netanyahu would have to break with the Israeli “Party of God" — the coalition of far-right Jewish settler supremacists and messianists who want Israel to permanently control all the territory from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean, with no border lines in between — just like on Bibi’s U.N. map. Those parties keep Bibi in power, so he would need to replace them with Israeli centrist parties, which I know would collaborate with him on such a move.

So there you have the big challenge of the day: The struggle between the world of inclusion and the world of resistance comes down to many things, but none more — today — than Netanyahu’s willingness to follow up his blow to the “Party of God” in Lebanon by dealing a similar political blow to the “Party of God” in Israel.

More from Thomas L. Friedman

Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman
Why Everything Is Suddenly Spiraling for Israel https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/25/opin ... hamas.html
Sept. 25, 2024

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America’s Role in the World Is Hard. It Just Got Much Harder. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/17/opin ... olicy.html
Sept. 17, 2024

Opinion | Thomas L. Friedman
America May Soon Face a Fateful Choice About Iran https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/01/opin ... l-war.html
Aug. 1, 2024

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/29/opin ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Canada Expels Indian Diplomats, Accusing Them of Criminal Campaign

The Canadian police said the Indian government had orchestrated homicides and extortion in Canada to intimidate Sikh separatists. India, in return, kicked out Canadian diplomats.


Sikh protesters in British Columbia, in September 2023.Credit...Carlos Osorio/Reuters

Canada accused the Indian government on Monday of homicide and extortion intended to silence critics of India living in Canada, escalating a bitter dispute that began last year with an assassination of a Sikh activist.

Canada expelled India’s top diplomat and five others, saying they were part of a vast criminal network. India reciprocated, expelling six Canadian diplomats.

The two countries have been in an intense dispute following the assassination in Canada of a prominent Sikh cleric, Hardeep Singh Nijjar. The government of Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said at the time that his killing had been orchestrated by the Indian government.

Canada is home to the largest Sikh community outside India, where the religious minority lives mostly in the northwestern state of Punjab. The Indian government says that some Sikhs in Canada are actively involved in a secessionist movement that seeks to carve a Sikh homeland known as Khalistan out of India.

Canadian officials said their investigation had focused on the Indian government’s involvement in a campaign aimed at Canadian Sikh activists.

The breakdown in the relationship between the two countries has gone all the way to the top. Mr. Trudeau said on Monday that he had confronted his Indian counterpart, Narendra Modi, about the investigation last week in Laos, where both men were attending a summit.

The Canadian leader said he had asked Mr. Modi for India’s cooperation ahead of a meeting between national security officials from both countries in Singapore. The officials were to discuss the involvement of Indian diplomats in what the authorities have described as serious criminal activities against Sikhs in Canada.

“I impressed upon him that it needed to be taken very, very seriously,” Mr. Trudeau told reporters in Ottawa at a news conference.

Despite the one-on-one discussion between the leaders, the Singapore meeting did not produce the cooperation Canadian officials had sought, leading to the diplomatic expulsions.

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The Canadian prime minister speaking at a lectern.

Prime Minister Justin Trudeau discussing Canada’s accusations against India on Monday.Credit...Justin Tang/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press

“We will never tolerate the involvement of a foreign government threatening and killing Canadian citizens on Canadian soil, a deeply unacceptable violation of Canada’s sovereignty and of international law,” Mr. Trudeau said.

Mélanie Joly, Canada’s foreign minister, said that her country had issued the expulsion orders to the six diplomats after the Indian government refused to waive their diplomatic immunity and allow them to participate in the Canadian investigations. Among those kicked out was Sanjay Kumar Verma, India’s high commissioner, or ambassador, to Canada.

Ms. Joly said that Canada’s law enforcement agencies had identified the six as “persons of interest” in the Nijjar assassination. “The decision to expel these individuals was made with great consideration,’’ she said, adding that investigators had “gathered ample, clear and concrete evidence.’’

Mr. Nijjar was ambushed and killed by three masked men outside a Sikh temple in Surrey, British Columbia. Three Indian nationals have been arrested and charged to date.

The Indian government, in its own statement on Monday, rejected Canada’s account of what had happened to its diplomats. India said it had pulled them out of Canada because of “an atmosphere of extremism and violence” that put them in danger.

The Indian government also said it was expelling six Canadian diplomats from India, including the embassy’s second-highest ranking diplomat, the chargé d’affaires, Stewart Wheeler.

The Indian government has vehemently denied accusations that it was involved in Mr. Nijjar’s killing, and maintains that the allegations against it are politically motivated. It says Mr. Trudeau is in cahoots with Sikh separatists in Canada because they support his Liberal Party.

A top Canadian law enforcement official, Mike Duheme, on Monday presented the accusations against the Indian government, saying that it had set up a criminal network inside Canada to harass and intimidate Sikhs. He provided few specifics about the allegations, but said the investigation had been aided by the F.B.I.

“An extraordinary situation is compelling us to speak about what we have discovered in our multiple ongoing investigations into the involvement of agents of the government of India in serious criminal activity in Canada,” said Mr. Duheme, who is the head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

He said that the police were taking the unusual step of going public because of a “significant threat to public safety in our country.”

Mr. Duheme said his officers had investigated and charged “a significant number of individuals for their direct involvement in homicides, extortions and other criminal acts of violence.”

He said there had been more than a dozen credible threats to life against members of the Sikh community in Canada. The Indian government agents, including the six diplomats expelled, were based not just in Ottawa, the capital, but also in Vancouver and Toronto and other cities across Canada where Sikhs live.

Image
Two people in uniform sitting at a table with a microphone.

Mike Duheme, head of the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, in Ottawa on Monday.Credit...Justin Tang/The Canadian Press, via Associated Press

While Mr. Duheme did not detail the means the Canadian authorities had used to collect evidence against the Indian government and its agents, he said that the investigations had found that it was running a major intelligence-gathering network in Canada. Some of those involved in the network were paid, he said, while others were coerced into helping.

“The information collected by the government of India is then used to target members of the South Asian community,” Mr. Duheme said.

India’s intelligence services have long been accused of directing the killings of opponents inside neighboring countries.

Canada’s accusations against India regarding the Nijjar assassination of have been bolstered by the findings of an American investigation into a similar, though unsuccessful, plot against a U.S.-based Sikh cleric. Last November, federal prosecutors in Manhattan said they had found connections between both plots.

The deepening rift between India and Canada comes as the United States, the European Union and other Canadian allies have been trying to court India as a counterweight to China. India is a booming power on the world stage both in terms of defense and in trade and the economy.

Mr. Trudeau said that he had informed his country’s closest intelligence allies about the developments. Together with Canada, the United States, Britain, Australia and New Zealand make up the so-called Five Eyes intelligence cooperation group.

The accusations against India arise as a Canadian commission is investigating the interference of foreign powers into domestic politics. A Canadian parliamentary report in June, based on information provided by the country’s intelligence services, identified China and India as the two countries that pose the biggest risk of foreign interference.

Mr. Kumar Verma, India’s ambassador to Canada, dismissed the report as politically motivated, and his government on Monday expressed its full support for him. “The aspersions cast on him by the government of Canada are ludicrous and deserve to be treated with contempt,” it said.

Anupreeta Das and Ian Austen contributed reporting.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/worl ... 778d3e6de3

[kmaherali]

Why the Heck Isn’t She Running Away With This?



Two big things baffle me about this election. The first is: Why are the polls so immobile? In mid-June the race between President Biden and Donald Trump was neck and neck. Since then, we’ve had a blizzard of big events, and still the race is basically where it was in June. It started out tied and has only gotten closer.

We supposedly live in a country in which a plurality of voters are independents. You’d think they’d behave, well, independently and get swayed by events. But no. In our era the polling numbers barely move.

The second thing that baffles me is: Why has politics been 50-50 for over a decade? We’ve had big shifts in the electorate, college-educated voters going left and non-college-educated voters going right. But still, the two parties are almost exactly evenly matched.

This is not historically normal. Usually we have one majority party that has a big vision for the country, and then we have a minority party that tries to poke holes in that vision. (In the 1930s the Democrats dominated with the New Deal, and the Republicans complained. In the 1980s the Reagan revolution dominated, and the Democrats tried to adjust.)

But today neither party has been able to expand its support to create that kind of majority coalition. As the American Enterprise Institute scholars Ruy Teixeira and Yuval Levin note in a new study, “Politics Without Winners,” we have two parties playing the role of minority party: “Each party runs campaigns focused almost entirely on the faults of the other, with no serious strategy for significantly broadening its electoral reach.”

Teixeira and Levin observe that both parties are content to live with deadlock. The parties, they write, “have prioritized the wishes of their most intensely devoted voters — who would never vote for the other party — over the priorities of winnable voters who could go either way.” Both parties “treat narrow victories like landslides and wave away narrow defeats, somehow seeing both as confirmation of their existing strategies.”

Trump has spent the past nine years not even trying to expand his base but just playing to the same MAGA grievances over and over again. Kamala Harris refuses to break with Biden on any significant issue and is running as a paint-by-numbers orthodox Democrat. Neither party tolerates much ideological diversity. Neither party has a plausible strategy to build a durable majority coalition. Why?

I think the reason for all this is that political parties no longer serve the function they used to. In days gone by, parties were political organizations designed to win elections and gain power. Party leaders would expand their coalitions toward that end. Today, on the other hand, in an increasingly secular age, political parties are better seen as religious organizations that exist to provide believers with meaning, membership and moral sanctification. If that’s your purpose, of course you have to stick to the existing gospel. You have to focus your attention on affirming the creed of the current true believers. You get so buried within the walls of your own catechism, you can’t even imagine what it would be like to think outside it.

When parties were primarily political organizations, they were led by elected officials and party bosses. Now that parties are more like quasi-religions, power lies with priesthood — the dispersed array of media figures, podcast hosts and activists who run the conversation, define party orthodoxy and determine the boundaries of acceptable belief.

Let’s look at the Democratic Party. The Democrats have huge advantages in America today. Unlike their opponents, they are not a threat to democracy. Voters trust them on issues like health care and are swinging their way on issues like abortion. They have a great base from which to potentially expand their coalition and build their majority. All they have to do is address their weaknesses, the places where they are out of step with most Americans.

The problem is that where you find their weaknesses, there you find the priesthood. The public conversation on the Democratic side of things is dominated by highly educated urban progressives who work in academia, the media, the activist groups and so on. These folks have a highly developed and self-confident worldview — a comprehensive critique of American society. The only problem is that this worldview is rejected by most Americans, who don’t share the critique. The more the Democrats embrace the priesthood’s orthodoxy, the more it loses working-class voters, including Hispanic and Black working-class voters.

For example, the progressive priesthood, quite admirably, is committed to fighting racial oppression. Its members believe that the way to do that is to be hyperaware of racial categories — in the diversity, equity and inclusion way — in order to rearrange preferences to support historically oppressed groups.

Most Americans also seek to fight racism, but they seek to do it in a different way. Their goal is to reduce the salience of racial categories so that people’s talents and initiative determine their life outcomes. According to a 2022 University of Southern California survey of Americans, 92 percent of respondents agreed with this statement: “Our goal as a society should be to treat all people the same without regard to the color of their skin.” Which is why only a third of Americans in a recent Pew Research Center survey said they supported using race as a factor in college admissions.

Or take energy. Most members of the Democratic clerisy are properly alarmed by climate change and believe we should rapidly shift from fossil fuels. Liberal white college graduates favor eliminating fossil fuels by two to one. It’s no skin off their teeth; they work on laptops.

But if you live in Oklahoma or work in an industry that runs on oil, coal or natural gas, this idea seems like an assault on your way of life, which, of course, it is. An overwhelming 72 percent of Americans favor an all-of-the-above approach, relying on both renewables and traditional energy sources.

Or take immigration. Highly educated white progressives tend to see the immigration and asylum issue through the lens of oppressor and oppressed: The people coming across our border are fleeing horror in their home countries. But most Americans see immigration through a law-and-order lens: We need to control our boundaries, preserve social order and take care of our own. In a June CBS survey 62 percent of Americans, including 53 percent of Hispanics, said they supported a program to deport undocumented immigrants — the most extreme version of this approach.

On these, as on so many other issues, the position that is held by a vast majority of Americans is unsayable in highly educated progressive circles. The priesthood has established official doctrine, and woe to anyone who contradicts it.

The Republicans have exactly the same dynamic, except their priesthood is dominated by shock jocks, tech bros and Christian nationalists, some of whom are literally members of the priesthood.

Harris clearly understands the problem. She has tried to run her campaign to show she is in tune with majority opinions. In a classic 2018 More in Common report, only 45 percent of the most liberal group in the survey said they were proud to be American. But Harris festooned her convention with patriotic symbols to the rafters. She’s now explicitly running on the theme: country before party.

But in just the few months she has had to campaign, Harris can’t turn around the Democratic Party’s entire identity. Plus, her gestures have all been stylistic; she hasn’t challenged Democratic orthodoxy on any substantive issue. Finally, candidates no longer have the ultimate power over what the party stands for. The priesthood — the people who dominate the national conversation — has the power.

The result is that each party has its own metaphysics. Each party is no longer just a political organism; it is a political-cultural-religious-class entity that organizes the social, moral and psychological lives of its believers.

Each party’s metaphysic seems to grow more rigid and impermeable as time goes by. Sometimes it seems that Harris is running not to be president of the United States but to be president of a theme park called Democratic Magic Mountain, while Trump is running to be president of Republican Fantasy Island. Each party has become too narcissistic to get outside its own head and try to build a coalition with people outside the camp of true believers.

The political problem for Harris is that there are a lot more Americans without a college degree than with one. Class is growing more salient in American life, with Hispanic and Black working-class voters shifting steadily over to the working-class party, the G.O.P.

The problem for Trump is that he is even better at repelling potential converts than the Democrats. He’d be winning landslides if he had tried to wedge MAGA Republicans into a coalition with Bush-McCain Republicans, but he’s incapable of that.

The problem for the rest of us is that we’re locked into this perpetual state of suspended animation in which the two parties are deadlocked and nothing ever changes. I keep running into people who are rooting for divided government for the next four years. It will mean that America will be able to do little to solve its problems. They see this as the least bad option.

More on U.S. politics

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/opin ... 778d3e6de3